31 October 2008

For Adam

In the War of Love, Adam Elfers and I put up one helluva fight. We never gave up on the wooing. From the very beginning and up until the very end of our pairing, we put almost all of us into each other. We called the product of our love "LaurAdam". We practiced Love as an art. As a test of will. We fine tuned our compassions. Dented our emotions. Drained our spirits. All in the name of it. I had never known such sacrifice. Or glimpsed such a world that we opened together.

I learned from Adam compassion. How to want and to love with gentleness and concern for The Other. I learned from him how to tend. How to nurture the garden of another so that they may bloom. I learned how to set aside my own desires and think of someone else before me. I saw how deeply i could wound someone who loved me. So I practiced kindness and patience and learned how to temper my edge. For him.

Adam inspired and encouraged me to do many things i'd never done before: Play drums in public; Compose music; Hold to my ideals in the face of embarrassment. Sometimes I even felt coerced to do things. But, i always valued whatever he put me through: At UD, we crashed a Gospel gathering; At King's Island, we rode The Slingshot, a tiny two-person orb hurled hundreds of feet in the air to bounce around on a metal string; In the streets of downtown Dayton, we danced as partners for the coming cars.

We imbued our union with ritual: In 1+1=1, we had a baby onstage and offered it in communion to the audience; Another night, we faced death together by adopting a disemboweled groundhog, making him a funeral bed, and interacting with the corpse; At the Springboro Christmas Festival, Adam helped me pee blindfolded inside a port-a-potty. We placed ourselves inside these lifescapes to see what would happen. To encourage things to happen. We learned by experiencing our own creations.

Our entire relationship was marked by creation. In the year and a half we were focused on each other, we sent innumerable text messages back and forth. Poetry. Photography. Music. Porn. Expressing ourselves in all the ways we could muster. Creating digital beings to breathe and speak for us through the airwaves. To maintain the us-ness. Keeping that door wide open and swinging wildly with the force of our efforts... It worked like a charm. It was exhilarating. And exhausting. And so very Beautiful.

Here is a visual excerpt from our saga. I took these specifically for him. For Adam:

Thank you, Dear One