Wild Blood, Rule Me Now

Rest my fear, lay my head
Drown my soul, paint it red
Wild blood, rule me now
Hold my hand, show me how
To recognize you
-Lovedrug, Wild Blood

I used to be wild. It was not so long in the past. Four years ago, around this time, my now-partner, Z, swept in to save me from my futile attempts to completely self-destruct. I essentially told him to fuck off. He didn’t.

The next year or so was all about the push-pull dance between us, where he would try to reign me in from the abyss, and I would break free and run towards it with arms wide open, preparing to jump, only to find the rope around my waist all over again.

Wild was fighting the current in every way possible. It was being a branch instead of a reed, just praying for the snap. Flitting between lucidity and madness, igniting an internal fire that I fanned with the aim of completely torching myself with it.

Then, somewhere along the way, I began to care. I realized one day, just a mundane moment of walking down the street, that I was not only happy…but I wanted to be. I wanted to live.

And that changed everything.

Over the past two years, I’ve grown tame. I live in a perpetual state of fear, and worry; feeling like I have no control over everything. Basically going back to the way I lived the first 25 years of my life. But when pushed to desperation, the wild would temporarily resurface.

So when Dionysus called me tame last February, I told him I wasn’t, and pleaded with him not to leave. He didn’t listen. He didn’t even look back as he left me, broken and bleeding.

The missing set in quickly. Every time I tried to reach out to him, he wasn’t there. That open connection I had with him was gone. In June or July, I realized he was right. I told him, but there was no response. When he did show up to tell me something important, it was brief, and always delivered like a smack to the face.

Recently, Z decided to intervene on my behalf and see if he couldn’t figure out what was going on. His explanation made sense. That Dionysus, who all but embodies the concept of Wild, had been either hurt or offended by my constant shunning of it except during desperation.

So some time, and tears, later, I started trying to correct that. Some things seem big, such as my outing myself as Bri on my Tumblr.* And some things seem really small, like reinforcing a tiny boundary with someone who likes to trample blindly all over them.

Wild is…I do not know what Wild is. I know that it’s not fighting the current just to fight. That it’s not being rigid and praying to be broken, and that it’s not harboring a fire just to ignite yourself.

But I can feel Dionysus approve, and I can feel the little trill in my heart every time the world doesn’t explode from my acting anything but meek and mild. Today, wild is ending a conversation I don’t want to have with my roommate by putting on headphones. Tomorrow, maybe it will be having enough faith in myself, and fire in my chest, that I no longer have to cower.

* I still haven’t linked my Tumblr with this blog, so you haven’t somehow missed something.