This Changes Everything

CHAPTER INTERLUDE IX

  A Compilation from Clara Branon's Personal Journals

  All the Epifanios

  May 10, 2012

  FIRST:

  Blonde hair, blue eyes. Amazingly graceful, lithe body. You are dancing, drumming, singing, acting, teaching, leading. You capture my heart and passion the first time I see each of you. I do not know your names or histories, your backgrounds or circumstances. I do not care.

  I am enraptured, infatuated and, eventually, once I get to know you and we are inside each other’s skin, in love. We are closer than I could ever imagine being with someone without being lovers. Then, occasionally, we kiss, we touch. I do make love with at least one of you, several times over several years.

  There are a male version of you and a female version of you: I am in love with you both and you with me, then you with each other. It's the '70s and '80s. We are polyamorous.

  We are chanters, candle-lighters, nude sauna and sweat lodge partakers, swimming naked at night in the ocean, pond, river or lake. We take shamanic journeys, encounter the Goddess, honor every cycle with sacred rituals, sharing the earth’s rhythms together. We breathe, we sob, we laugh, we sing, we dance, we celebrate.

  I introduce you to one another, wanting the triad of us to be impenetrable. But, when you two fall into lust, I am squeezed out. Parent issues, anyone?

  I weep, I plead, I beg, I ignore, I scream. I am crushed and cannot breathe.

  You apologize, you hide, you lie, you falter.

  I doubt.

  You become afraid. You close down to each other and then, to me.

  You tell me: “Don’t look at me with those eyes.”

  I reply, bewildered, and deeply wounded: “These are the only eyes I have.”

  Epifanio (male version) leaves my life after only three years in it; I mourn the loss for almost ten more years.

  Epifanio (female version) stays longer in my life, but also leaves; this time, I am steeled for the loss and only mourn for one year.

  My abyss is bottomless; the gaping hole must be filled.

  NEXT:

  Chestnut hair, long and flowing, angles and tallness, power and beauty. You are brilliant, articulate, graceful, creative, courageous, talented, dynamic, captivating, magnetic. Your charisma captures me, filling me with hope, joy, inspiration, new experiences. I bring almost every friend I have to you, to learn, to grow, to change.

  First, the female and then, the male. I love you both. You are already in love with one another.

  We create a bond, all three of us, and others are included as well.

  You two marry, bringing me and one other as your only witnesses. You shine. Your glow crosses the country and brings more into your light.

  But, the light dims between you and you separate. I strive to love you both, separately.

  I am loyal to each of you. I try to understand.

  In your female version, you compete with and challenge me, capriciously accept and reject me. You eventually become intimidated, too, afraid and unable to continue. We part.

  Your male version draws me in, unafraid, larger and more capable, ready to hold and even contain me. I go to you, happily, relieved to be welcomed. We forge a stronger bond than ever, but you do not love me the way I love you. Yet? Ever?

  I stay in your orbit, however distant, at times, willing to be wherever you permit, because I am desperate to be included at all. I wait, wish and wonder.

  Then, as with the other Fanios, you become confused, using your projections onto me to blame me for feeling threatened, intimidated, afraid. You are hot and cold, intense in your ambivalence and bewilderingly unpredictable, and then, rejecting.

  More parent issues? This time, yours?

  Heartbroken, I contemplate whether to sever our ties.

  ENTROPY:

  When a system is isolated, entropy always increases or remains constant. It is also a measure of the tendency of a process to proceed in a particular direction. Entropy determines that heat, as thermal energy, always flows spontaneously from regions of higher temperature to regions of lower temperature. From higher to lower, from up to down. Warm flows to cold, losing warmth as it goes.

  Each of these Epifanios and I get colder and more distant. It’s inevitable.

  Entropy is an expression of disorder or randomness. We need entropy to explain why some processes occur spontaneously while their opposites ALT [According to Linear Time] do not; systems tend to progress in the direction of increasing entropy.

  Any system can reach a point where the location, the container and the contents of the container will be at the same temperature. In this situation, nothing else can happen. Stagnation occurs unless an external event intervenes; otherwise, the location is destined to remain in the same condition for all eternity.

  But there is this fact: all things fall apart.

  The entropy of the multiverse is steadily increasing, meaning that its total energy is becoming less useful. The joint entropy of a set of variables is greater than or equal to all of the individual entropies of the variables in the set.

  People in relationships cannot stay together. Impermanence always intervenes in the form of volitional or optional separation, up to and including the death of one or both partners.

  How uncertain are we about a relationship's outcome? How much can we pretend not to know?

  There are close to 1028 atoms in a human body. Only about half of them are hydrogen atoms. All the rest of them are formed inside of stars.

  We are all stardust.

  When a star dies, it “goes nuclear,” becoming a SUPERNOVA by exploding, or the star implodes into a Black Hole. When a star explodes, its atoms are sent back out into the multiverse over billions of years, finding their way into every physical form, including me, including you, including all the Epifanios.

  How appropriate, then, my next phase. Bereft of all my Epifanios and mourning the losses, I become liaison to the multiverse’s most distant stardust forms.

  Why do human relationships end? There are, apparently, seven common reasons. Top two: 1) things change (kind of encompasses all the other seven…), meaning, the circumstances that bring us together end or one of us leaves the nest (school, job, neighborhood); 2) people change in ways that cause separate interests to flow and common ones to ebb; and/or, sex ceases.

  Next common four reasons loving partnerships end: 3) someone lies, cheats on, betrays the other. Obvious. Volatile. More subtle: 4) mismatched life stages, in which our growth spurts do not mesh, we grow at different rates, in opposite or perpendicular directions and become incompatible (presuming we are ever well-matched). Intermediately apparent: 5) commitment issues (kind of begs the question, though, of how we get involved at all…); 6) jealousy, competitiveness, insecurities (founded or not). Good Buddhist that I am, I group these four together as INHERENT SELFISHNESS.

  Finally, why do we stop wanting to be together, fail to stay in love, have to leave the relationship? 7) We are wrong for each other. It takes a while for one or both of us to figure that out.

  As Zephyr explains: "Once the oxytocin diminishes, the couple has to like and respect each other sufficiently or the honeymoon is all they ever have."

  Maybe each of my Epifanios saves me a lot of grief by not coming closer, or never for very long: all we ever are is over before we begin. It is sometimes not "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." I stand as an example of that contradiction.

  Psi-Penalties may not be all bad….Maybe I'd rather be Psi-Ped than abandoned again. Stay away, Fanio. We're both better off.