Time and Distance in Relationships

What is looking out of these eyes does not feel old; it feels as if it's getting younger, although in reality it's never changing.

It's what is looking at the body as the wrinkles appear and the belly-over-belt gets larger and the aches and pains of middle-age creep up.

It's what sees the world without contraction, because it is the world.

It's what notices the contractions as they appear:

As I pull back from intimacy
how could I? this would suggest two, and it is all not-two

As intimacy pulls back from me
there is no me. How can something pull back from what does not exist?

Still, let's assume that the contraction exists, that the relative playground is real, the place I have to live and work and connect and ...

As I contract into the relative world, I become identified with the

thoughts
feelings

But this identification with is a mistaken perception. For in the amnesia of contraction I forget that I am *not* the thoughts and the feelings but that which is aware of them.

I feel like I am the flurry of electricity under the sternum. From clear seeing, this is true. I am that which is aware of the flurry; there is no separation between the flurry and that which is aware of it. But from contraction's myopia, I simply am the flurry, a contained, separate, freefloating existentialist nightmare. A ball in the universe, forever frozen and alienated from everything around me.

When I'm there, the connection with friends is tight and regimented. I feel the pain of separation and want to salve it, which leads me to what I *could* do outside of the now. This makes the separation more pronounced, eye contact stutters, and I contract more.

I tangle in on the lines coming from the heart; confused, manic, trying to connect to the friend, to the other.

And with each meeting of each friend the problem compounds and the separation is more intense.

What then, of the option?

Soak in the uncertainty and purity of living, timeless awareness.