hold Toxic_Kisses ... me my love, and promise never to let go 020326 ... silentbob kiss me and kiss me til i'm dead 020327 ... silentbob I want to hold your head while we listen to this song, so you can hear my heartbeat like a washing machine before i pass like a funeral parade motorcade and you can throw the confetti but let my last breath smell like you. I never want to stop kissing your impressive face or smelling the shirt that i left in your room. i think you sparked something in me not even toerrential rain could put out only magnify. i don't care for my responsibilities because like a dying soldier, i've got your head in my arms. 040411 ... tessa as I stood there alone surrounded by all the people and the music it was wonderful I closed my eyes and imagined what it might be like if there was someone to hold me to simply and easily put arms around me to be with me in this place to smile because I smile to share this with I opened my eyes and my bones ached 040725 ... gja Twice someone has held my head. Twice that I can recall. So we'll call it twice since moments beyond / before memory don't exist do they? Strangely I can’t recall the order of these two occurrences. In any case it matters not. I think. I'm reckoning that a human head is a heavy thing to hold. First indicator of such is the relief in my neck muscles when I lie down. Second is the result of a quick inter-web search: somewhere between 4.5 to 5.5 kilograms it seems. That reckoning, I read, is based on the amount of water displaced from a bucket by a human head and the stated assumption that the whole kit and caboodle (skin; flesh; orifices; skull; grey matter, etc.) is roughly the same density as the displaced water. Then, working on 1 litre of water being roughly equal to 1 kilogram (ignoring the vagaries of height above sea level; approaching weather; angle of the sun; phase of the moon; suspended salts, etc.) the weight of subject head can become to be known. For completeness I would have liked some mention made of the age; gender and ego of the displacing head. No matter. Perhaps pedantry? But I would also have liked a quick clarification as to the status of the heads owner with regard liveliness and connectedness, but again, no matter. For my purposes I'm going to go with the high end of the weight range - based solely on my, generally, excellent nourishment and a widely held healthy opinion of my mental capacity. So the first time, and it has just occurred to me to reverse the order in which I recount, was on a massage table. It was at the end of the massage. But here I have jumped the gun. It is important to clarify what I mean by having my head held. I'm discounting a cuddle of the cranium. A lovingly applied headlock is not what I wish to report. Nor is a squeeze; a rub or a push or a pat. A scrum is irrelevant. You and I, we, are occluding ourselves such that only a genuine weight bearing hold is that of which we speak. OK? So a brutish massage had been had. She was big and Lebanese and not all tentative; furtive; or fingery. She kneaded; squashed; stretched and compressed all parts of my body, equally, with parts of her own. The result was that I was exhausted. Not only from the resistance I had made to her powerful ministrations but from the mental contortions I had made to forget and forgive, how shall we say, the ritual humiliation she had metered my way. I was laying flat on my back, naked, really, unable to move. And just as I gathered my wiles the music stopped and she moved behind my head. Out of eyesight. "Relax" she suggested as if alternatives existed. And then she placed her hands, perfectly symmetrically I recall, behind my ears. And then she held my head. Just off the table. She took all of its weight. Heat passed between us. And I'm sure I passed out. Because I do not know when my head became un-held; when it was that it was returned to an inanimate bearer. It’s all unknown. And unknowable, the first time someone held my head. The second time began much more urgently. I presented, in the evening, at the emergency department of my local, thankfully large and well chosen, metropolitan hospital with bright and brassy and amorphous pain in my abdomen. Now far be it from me to criticise our native universal health care system but I should not leave it unknown, at least between you and I, that I feel I was left unattended for far too long. Sure a healthcare professional might have adduced that my sufferings were not life threatening but they certainly did not convey that to me. To the point that in the brief, and diminishing, moments between bursts of agony I did need to point out to my prospective carers that I felt I was being, how we shall say, a little avoided. A little ignored. Simply being borne as a potential patient rather than known as a suffering soul. In any case, whether due to my imploring or just expedient timeliness, I was finally diagnosed with acute* (* note that is the term recorded in medical file) appendicitis. I feinted on the spot. And as I was coming around I caught whispers of arrangements for emergency surgery, transfers, preparations, paperwork, and contact with next of kin. I feinted again. When I returned to some sort of mild, despite my predicament, apperception I was proffered pain relief. Despite the faculty of speech being beyond me I consented (perhaps, I admit without any fear of being judged as weak, even encouraged - I WAS in tremendous torment) enthusiastically with my eyes. A young nurse appeared almost immediately brandishing a large leaking syringe. She plunged it deep into the intravenous drip bag that had recently been hung above my bed and connected to my forearm. The injected chemicals, clean and pure and filled with light, hit my blood stream almost instantly. Baptising. She asked in her white dress "would you like me to hold your head?" I don't think I responded. She somehow had come to know that my lack of response was, whether I knew it or not, a willing and fulsomeness wish for that to happen. She moved behind me, just off centre. Her hands held my temples. She applied wonderful pressure. She lifted my head. She held my head. I floated away. 141202 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I was sitting here putting my head in my hands, not from any emotional distress, but just trying to get a feel of what it's like to hold the weight of a head. I don't think I've supported the weight of anyone's head that way, except for the occasional baby-carrying (holding, not being pregnant, that is). I'm glad someone was finally there to give you some comfort before surgery. At any rate, the story was riveting; good, too, for sparking thoughts about how memory draws disparate things together. 141202 ... fishawk So sweet that she offered to hold your head, the place I would think you felt contained in swimming in numbing chemicals, only thoughts and spirit... To be held and comforted by a stranger through something so intense and scary and uncertain. The spirit of kindness and empathetic oneness. Kindness can make all the difference. Heads are so strange on upright standing creature such as ourselves... vulnerable and heavy. Awkward_balloon   141203 ... fishawk My motion is on_hold due to a strain in my leg and the relentless rain outside. Hold. Holding still, holding in all my sweat and other bodily things as a result, holding emotional , holding it all, breathless for no good reason. 141203 ... gja So sad that the word has been subsumed to be construed as a point of mutually agreeable paralysis. I get told that things are on hold. I don’t even know what things are. What are THINGS for fuck sake. A telephone call. A project. A love. A life. There is no fucking hold. Correct me if I’m wrong. PLEASE?! The big old clock keeps ticking. It doesn’t stop despite OR To spite. Our will. Hold. 170308 what's it to you? who go blather from