a duality inversion
by
captain mission

The world has come asunder. Everything I really loved has just driven away in a taxi to another man for a holiday. I'm to old now, fragile and somewhat battle weary. I'm half defeated and lost and i have a long day ahead of me. My exhaustion and physical stress is easy for me to deal with, I adopt some martial art strategies but the emotional disconnection is shutting me down.
When eventually I sleep everything changes. Magick works through me.
In the morning I'm strong again. My fingertips tingle with a mission worthwhile.
My motive was to resolve a rift, a strange cyclic event, not a  Saturn return more a Mars one. However, we have history and I thought it time I reached out and attempted to fix something broken between us, after all she has attempted several times to reach out to me.
It's not a good start as she has given me the wrong address but eventually I wander through old haunts, in the oldest part of the city and find the correct place a big plush hotel with elegance and style, an architects dream. It's quite magnificent.
Obviously with you there's always subterfuge.
I play my part and pick up the key from reception. I seem to be everyones secret. The other woman. It makes me sad in a way. I'm always hidden, an occult secret for glamorous women.
I can't believe this place, it's perfect, elegant and immaculate. The type of place I would live in if I was cashed up and addicted to luxury.
I ride the lift to your room and use the security key, stepping into your rock and roll lifestyle. It's different now, children's clothes everywhere, toys and lollies, bags spilling out with almost everything, all early childhood accessories imaginable. In our past it was drugs, empty bottles and an ugly chaos. I look around the room, there is nothing ugly about this mess. 
I head straight for the shower and check out the huge bathtub.
When you arrive I'm bemused, head in a book. I emerge, eyes upon you and the kid.
She's grown up. I'm quite surprised at the way time measures itself upon her, she's talking and asking questions, her tiny eyes soaking me up and it's love at first sight. She knew me in utero, she knew me as a fresh baby, the man who carried her mothers apples home, helped fix up the nursery, read you stories and wrapped you up when you were cold.
We are like old friends, her and I, time non existent in such a wonderfully weird way she knows me very well.
You and I hug, exchange a few emotional words. Rare for us. Rare for you.
'Don't fall in love with me.' You say.
'I'm in love with someone else.'
'I bet she is an artist?'
'She's so much more than just an artist.'
We exchange a few war tales, after all it has been a long long time and we have both changed considerably. I speak of my departure from town after my friends death, how I never went back. 
She tells of her fathers death and then Brads. She then hits me with some facts, she married Brad early in her life. I didn't know this, it explains why he was always around as her go to guy. I can't say I liked him, but I never got in her way.
And I loved her dad, a man I lived with and got to know very well. He was a great artist and a thinker. We spend many evenings talking and laughing while he burnt dinner. He often reminded me of myself through his eccentricities and whimsy. We shared something anyway, maybe it was just her.
She tells me how she nursed him and Brad in their last days and gave them their last shot of morphine, watched them slip away. Two men she loved. 
In our past life she was both beauty and the beast. I couldn't watch her destroy herself, it was painful for me so I left. Twice. 
The second time was when her child was barely new, but I had to make a point having seen what was happening and what would happen if she was not derailed. It was hard for me, but right action despite the fact she felt I had abandoned her. 
Maybe I did. I don't like watching people I care about self destruct. Maybe it was just what was needed as she claims she is different now, and I must concede she seems very different.
I can see her in her child. 
The child is beautiful, quite brilliant and individual, creative and  intelligent, a natural artist just like mum.  We are connected, almost best friends. How does that happen in such a short time. She's making me laugh and I'm relaxing into a role that seems very natural. 
Room service is on speed dial, even the kid uses it, and soon all types of wonderful things are brought to us in big trollies and silver plates, banana spilts, ice creams, chocolates, desserts, dinners, coffee.
It's all really quite strange for me especially when she makes her proposal.
Suddenly things are not quite what they appear. I understand very fast what's going down but where is it coming from. 
Now I have to say, there is a similarity I have never spoken about. My beautiful heart belongs to another now and she is the best of you even if she is with someone else and uncontactable, I love her completely. She reminds me of you sometimes, that creativity, the brilliant mind, the polarity although she is never as destructive like you were she has confusing elements that are contradictory but maybe that's just all women. Sometimes she can say things that sound like something you would have said to me. Sometimes her lack of romance and affection towards me remind me of you. She also claims to be sensitive and yet can be very insensitive. Maybe it's just me, after all I am the common domominator. Either way there's an alien complexity at work within what to me should be easy and simple.
Your eyes dart around like hers, and then uncannily your words become hers.
The proposal of an artistic hub, a joint partnership promoting beauty. Your offer was incredible, generous and so unexpected. But the language was her language. I'm seeing it, hearing it and it's undeniably her. I mean she's in Tasmania and you are right here speaking her words.
I try to explain the impossible to you but I don't think you fully understand how significant this experience is or how much it has freaked me out.
We deflect and skim subjects, but there is more revelation, more truth than i have heard in a long time.
I feel so strange to be honest  my life is at a crossroads in love and yet she has told me explicitly not to contact her while she is away. I needed to speak with her but I can't, and I have to give a decision, I have to choose a future but all i can do is think about an us.
I end up staying all weekend, playing with that little girl, we swim in the elegant indoor pool, we play inventive games, we laugh a lot and I loose myself in her imagination. She's a beautiful child, with a beautiful mother. It's a joy for me to observe.
My thoughts intrude. This is what you saw in your visions when you were with her, a future where the three of us had this, but you thought perhaps it would be your child. 
Yes, I saw it all back then and now, here I am, in a different future. My heart feels sad but then I think about what is ahead. 
Her, my beauty in the world. She's far away and enjoying her trip and here I am unexpectedly enjoying mine. 
Parallel worlds, lives, alternative realities, a strange confirmation as souls all collide into past present and future. 
I'm lost within it all, adrift with no certainty only the overwhelming experience. It's my slow beautiful death. But it's not so beautiful without you. I have to face it, face the truth.
I feel abandoned now, angry at the position you left me in when you climbed into that taxi, angry at the way you never even bothered to call me except as an after thought, angry at your drinking and being so incoherent when we spoke, angry at the fact you can't even see me through a clear lens. Most of all I feel angry at myself for thinking about the futility of an us, when clearly you only think in terms of I. I have to shift gears, that's not sustainable, something has to give.
I lived that life once with this woman from my past that now is in my present. I recognise the way it works, always testing, testing, pushing the limits, seeing where my breaking point lays, demanding everything on their own terms, no fucking compromise in love hey?
You have it all. Both off you have it all and it's never enough until it's gone.
And I do love both of you. There is no difference for me. One is my past the other my present. And she is not with me.
Here is an old man with a broken heart looking into the eyes of a child.
I return to Avalon, to a beautiful home a few doors away from my old home, she makes me a drink and I gaze down at the view from the hill. She puts on 'Make it Happen' the song that invoked my spell that brought you to me. It's to strange, to surreal. Yet we are all artists, and I've lived in the surreal with both of you. 
We go look at the space she wants, it's perfect. I see her vision and it's brilliantly executed, she's covered all bases. We would make a brilliant creative team but it's hard to commit to something without my other half. She has said both of us can be involved but I need to speak with you and I can't. 
The house is filled with Art, good art, it overflows everywhere, I notice her fathers work, a Brett Whitley, some Bruce Gould, and I'm cast back to the days where I hung with Arkie. I used to live across the street from Bruce, remember watching Vanessa Meae film a video in his garden. Parties at Lashes, surfing whenever I wanted.
We drive down to look at her new home. It's on the beach. She wants me to move in with her. Rent free, a new life back where I belong.
I'm stuck between two paths, and you are not here for me. Again a surge of anger. It's more directed at myself for being so stupid investing in an us. I'm angry at falling in love with someone who obviously cannot reciprocate and I'm angry at myself for even allowing the weakness of exposing my emotional reality and having it  exploited. I really do not feel loved at all. I don't even feel special or wanted, desired or needed, just a secret to be kept. It makes me sick. Nauseous. It passes, I can't be angry for to long, it's a situation and she is doing her best under the circumstances. 
I want a life with her, and I want to move in to this new life for me. To do something for me. But loyalty is my weakness, I sabotage myself always through loyalty. 
Eventually I decline the offer although I have really struggled making a decision. I will be hated for it, despite the fact I love her completely unconditionally. I can't believe how far she has come, a success, a brilliant mother and my past resolved. I don't want to say goodbye, these two are so much part of me, I can't bare loosing them again but I'm a dumb bastard, not stubborn just dumb because I am cursed with being loyal. 
When the present arrives it's so strange, I don't understand anything. I feel so fucking worthless. I want to just communicate openly, make a plan, to understand but all it is is just incoherence. Polarity dancing. Emotional, sexual, mental sabotage. I can't understand it at all, the harder I try the worse it becomes, every question I have is met with some barrier, straight lines bend, light warps, love slips away, replaced by distortion and something alien to me, something abhorrent. There is no love here, nothing but more testing, pushing, more mind games. More brainiac mumbo-jumbo nonsense than heart, more glam than authenticity, it all went to pieces and not once did she ever ask, 'How was your weekend?'
And at the back of my mind I see again a truth. There is no us. 
I have to find me. Discover the I again. And another truth hits me hard. I hate what I have become. I'm worth so much more than this. I deserve so much more than this.
Here is an old man with a broken heart.