Possession.

Of all the things to covet, a human being I cannot possess.

You can steal a cadaver. Rent a warm orifice for the night. Take advantage of a pair of inebriated lips. Sign a lease on a womb, a brain or some assortment of body parts. You can buy its loyalty to stay still in one spot but never forever. Death takes over.

You cannot own a person.

Image courtesy of Complejo

No one can possess you, let alone steal another being from your grasp. You are not a captive unless bound to the earth with metal chains and cuffs. You are responsible, no one else. Gravitate to one another like moths to fire but the flames can never lay claim to its fluttering body before it licks the wings to cinders.

Though you may never have them, they leave an imprint and that’s all that you can keep: some permanent, some temporary, some for the better and some for the worse. Just being with them – their presence and sometimes their mere existence – draws out from you a colour you didn’t know you had or have always known but now amplified in a different hue. Like a muse. Like electricity: a palpable awareness of your very being, your words and your looks. It’s all you. It’s frightening and unfamiliar. You crave how you look in their eyes and that recognition is very particular, very unique, very distinct from one encounter to another.

That’s why we seek to possess one another…. but it’s all a futile pursuit.

People will leave you. There’s nothing you can do to stop them. Sometimes they come back if they want you and if you let them. It’s all a matter of time and circumstance when everything falls into place.

I can never possess you.  You can never have me.

We are free. Or are we?

“He saw the strange entanglements of passions and circumstance and compulsion everywhere, but always the dread insomnia of compulsion. It was fear… that made men mad…. There was nothing he could touch, for all, in a mad assertion of the ego, wanted to put a compulsion on him and violate his intrinsic solitude. It was the mania of cities and societies and hosts, to lay a compulsion upon a man, upon all men. For men and women alike were mad with the egoistic fear of their own nothingness.”

- The Man Who Died, D H Lawrence