The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

I remember the first girl I truly thought that I loved. Rani was everything I’d ever wanted in a girl. She was tough and bad.  She sang and played guitar. A screamer.  First time we met she was up on stage in this bar. She was just rocking up there, her blond hair flying all over, covering her face. Screaming. She’s jamming this song, going nuts when she just finishes and looks like she’s going to pass out. She’s on her knees, her face lowered, but her eyes looking out at the rest of us from under that hair, she’s panting, and just staring with this evil smile on her face and the next thing you know she mouths a kiss and it’s right at me. I knew that for a fact.
Yeah, that was the first time I met that girl and the first time I ever got the clap too. I thought I really loved that one.
But she didn’t know what she wanted.  She strung me along for about four months before her wiggly little mind ran off its rails and I got the boot. I’m not sure why I got the boot. To this day, I thought I had a chance to have real love because it felt like love. I worshiped that one.  But I started getting the hint when she started getting restless, not talking very much, getting bugged at me for just being, and especially, for loving her at all.  There are some people who can’t deal with people being in love with them. It makes them feel trapped. I guess in this day and age that sort of psychological state has dire physical effects, hence the clap that I got.
What was it about Rani? I guess it was the fact she was as fucking lost and rebellious as I was. But when it came time for it to be the basis for a long term relationship it just didn’t work.  She was more aggressive than I was and very ambitious.  I’m a frog, a root. I’ll sit in my world and dream and when it comes out on my guitar, in my music, it’s a thousand times bigger, but it’s still not as big as the original conception if it could be tapped in a truer form.  This is the case really because I think all of my music is attached to emotion laid so far buried inside me that to discover a song, and that is what I do, is like being introduced to myself except only in symbolic form.  Rani was a lot like me in that she had a store of emotion that she needed to release, but for her the only pure enjoyment would be to erupt, explode, lose everything outer about herself, every way that she has ever been conditioned by the world, family or even men.  She just didn’t want to live in a world that didn’t have the energy of a volcanic eruption.  Everybody who didn’t aspire to her criterion for what real life consists of was left behind, she hung around for awhile, but, to be honest, without the funds to really finance her desire for a thermonuclear pillow, any suitor was going to find it difficult to get close, to have her fall in love with him, which, she claimed, never happened overnight. I don’t think it can happen it all.  But that doesn’t matter anymore. Rani is gone.
But that’s over. I’ve mentioned her to Moxy and Moxy doesn’t have much to say about it.  She was in love once too before me, to a guy named Brad. Brad was supposed to be the type for her, but then she met me.  We came to each other across different worlds, but our true spirits were too alike for us to be with anybody else. I didn’t think I could ever be with anybody else after Rani.  I’d never felt so betrayed and full of grief. I thought that I would never find somebody so wild, so filled with life. I honestly felt like I’d lost half of myself when she left me.  But now I see this wasn’t true.  I got enough of my own wild spirit inside of me I don’t need to be looking at it all the time. Besides that wildness is really just me filling a need for worship. I know that sounds funny to say, but I believe that if man don’t worship something, let his spirit go wild over something bigger than himself then he’s got problems.  He starts worshiping himself or something. I put all that church energy right in Rani and then it was proven that it is not meant for man to put such loftiness upon a fellow human being. She did all the accepting of love from me.  That was my job. After awhile she felt too distanced from me.  She didn’t reciprocate.  She wanted out.
Rani is a drowned man. She looks out at the world through eyes that are covered with water. She sees though, sees most clearly, clearer than most, but to see she must consume something in the way of her vision, something that the rest of us wouldn’t assume would need to be consumed, the ether of our personality, the build up of what we had become to that point by virtue of who we had been with and where we had been.  When she looked at me off that stage I was looking at a girl who was flinging away so much of the shit that had been put on her by expectation that I thought I was seeing a type of goddess. The reality was that I was seeing the drowning man accepting his state of existence, a wisp of a soul, alive, ever alive, but dying slowly  with a ferocity of everlasting vision that penetrated and taught whoever saw it.  I can’t help but say that Rani was as myth-like as Moxy, but myth-like in a spookier way.  She really believed everything that she did with her personality, all of the changes she enforced, changes that would take me or you years she pushed through so fast that it made her eyes like deep pockets, the orbs within hollow yet penetrating, lost yet found, seeing but blind as a bat.  Rani Anderson was one of the most intriguing people I have ever known, but she never loved me and Moxy did and the funny advantage, the one advantage that I had never before experienced in a my relationship was that with Moxy, she actually loved me back.  I can honestly say that this made my relati0onship 1000 times, a million times better than that one with Rani.  I thought I loved Rani, goddammit, I have to admit it, I really did love Rani, but I wasn’t in love. To be in love you need two people. With Rani I was all alone.  It took a long time for me to really accept that and now that I do, with or without Moxy, I realize that I wouldn’t go back to her for all of the tea in China as they say.  The reality is that we cannot throw ourselves away like that. We can’t afford to be in relationships where both people do not love each other with an equal force.  I’m still a little sad about Rani. Who isn’t sad when they are thrown away by somebody they loved? Yeah, I still get a little sad sometimes, but I don’t tell anybody.