In the confusion of survival it’s hard to decipher where in our drive our fears end and our sincerity begins. Our fears, possessing the sometimes haunted house that we call body, that we call mind. Our fears, so interwoven and hungry that their roots creep deeper into our primal soil while their leaves sprout higher into camouflaged gardens, true cause inconceivable to effect, and so never connected by our consciousness of the daylight hours; kept at bay by wisdom not welcome in the years passing by too fast.
But our third eye knows all, our sixth sense, our heart of hearts, our fears of our fears. An ephemeral finger points a steady hand at unsteady dreams. An unwanted vision deposits wanted clues. An uninvited truth runs its finger down our backs and our hair stands on end. A shiver passes but doesn’t leave. “That cold wind,” we say. Desperation is quite the storm. Brewing deep below the ocean where memories like creatures survive with no light and are sustained with food that would kill anything trying to live life on the surface.
Do you understand what I am saying yet?
Fears of our fears. This is all that can awaken in us the desire to be awakened. Rising like an unforeseen wave to deform sandcastles built too close to stormy waters. Performing a striptease with our gaping neglect of dormant dreams. Neglect revealed through confusion, revealed through epiphany, revealed through tears, revealed through the silence at the end of a day where nothing made sense, and feels like it never will again.
Wednesday
Sunday
one true thing
How is it that feelings of loss and pain are always accompanied by feelings of pure love not for a person or a situation or an idea (that has touched me and taken a room in my mind for its own visions) but for life just life And how is it that I am so taken with this love with what this love does for my soul and how that love is in fact my spirit and that as much love as there is in my spirit is as much love as I have to give And does this mean that I will always have strength to remain my better self as things fall all around me because in the falling I see love and in the debris I find hope and in the carnage I smell love's hope still fresh and looking for life?
repeat into silence
He looks at me with his love-brown eyes. A straight face at first, his eyes in deep conversation with mine, we're saying everything we have always said, and how it will be forever that these words exist between us.
And then a quick smile dawns over his cheeks, and mine follow like a wave that flows from his heart to mine. And there's nothing that I can say, except for "marry me." And nothing that he can say, except for "no." Except that he could say "just tell me why," and I could say, "because my world will not have it so."
And there's nothing more I can explain, and a void opens up inside me and slips its shadow over all the love that drowns in me every day, as if it did not die yesterday too, and as if I do not die in his presence, and in his absence, and in my solitude since I left him behind to find a road that does not open before me.
"There's nothing more I have ever wanted and nothing I have been able to want since," my wounded truth sends into his almost closed believing.
"But yet," he says, "you cannot choose me to love every morning and all the following day?"
"I have chosen it," I say a thousand times.
"But you cannot do it in this life, in our real life, outside of your heart, outside of your poems?"
"I cannot," I do not say but say nothing meaning the same.
"And you cannot explain why," he says not even asking.
"I cannot" I repeat into the same silence, a place that once roared with my voice and my excuses and my begging for forgiveness and chances, a place we eventually evacuated and that I now carry with me everywhere, making me as meek and barren as the smoldering hope in the embers of these daydreams.
"Then," he says, "we will be always apart and never together, and you will always be alone and I will soon pull the shroud over your impossible presence in my life, which will be rewritten without you."
Frozen and buzzing I turn from these ghosts in the empty seat before me, and I do not know whether to breathe again, or how to live, except for in these imaginary conversation between you and me, in this café and so many others, full of people living their lives while I make up stories so I can still feel you in mine.
And then a quick smile dawns over his cheeks, and mine follow like a wave that flows from his heart to mine. And there's nothing that I can say, except for "marry me." And nothing that he can say, except for "no." Except that he could say "just tell me why," and I could say, "because my world will not have it so."
And there's nothing more I can explain, and a void opens up inside me and slips its shadow over all the love that drowns in me every day, as if it did not die yesterday too, and as if I do not die in his presence, and in his absence, and in my solitude since I left him behind to find a road that does not open before me.
"There's nothing more I have ever wanted and nothing I have been able to want since," my wounded truth sends into his almost closed believing.
"But yet," he says, "you cannot choose me to love every morning and all the following day?"
"I have chosen it," I say a thousand times.
"But you cannot do it in this life, in our real life, outside of your heart, outside of your poems?"
"I cannot," I do not say but say nothing meaning the same.
"And you cannot explain why," he says not even asking.
"I cannot" I repeat into the same silence, a place that once roared with my voice and my excuses and my begging for forgiveness and chances, a place we eventually evacuated and that I now carry with me everywhere, making me as meek and barren as the smoldering hope in the embers of these daydreams.
"Then," he says, "we will be always apart and never together, and you will always be alone and I will soon pull the shroud over your impossible presence in my life, which will be rewritten without you."
Frozen and buzzing I turn from these ghosts in the empty seat before me, and I do not know whether to breathe again, or how to live, except for in these imaginary conversation between you and me, in this café and so many others, full of people living their lives while I make up stories so I can still feel you in mine.
Saturday
letting go
I have to let it go, my anger. There it goes. It’s going. I can see it, a little wobbly, maybe, a little unsure where to go, exactly. First time on your own is always hard, I whisper, but keep putting one angry foot in front of the other, my friend. I think we’ve grown apart, you see. Hard as it is, there’s someone out there who needs you more than me right now. So off you go. Ciao, old pal. Adios and all. I’ll see you around. Maybe even tonight. Maybe sooner than we think.
Thursday
Perfect Connection
Who has the right to expect perfection of another? Who has a right to want completeness? To set up this stage littered with trap doors, to underestimate the rise of disappointment, its inevitable swell, and not only to believe, but to expect, to invest emotion in its unsustainable reality?
And then to explain that love was lost in that moment, when the well-oiled points of total connection slipped by one another and fell awkwardly to the floor, and lay impotent and thrashing in prosaic confusion. Their fall from grace, from the exaltation of sky and endlessness, of blue depth and the illusion that frosty clouds are warm cotton clusters; that they are cushion castles and do not house tomorrow’s storms and sudden, random electrical shocks.
And then to explain that love was lost in that moment, when the well-oiled points of total connection slipped by one another and fell awkwardly to the floor, and lay impotent and thrashing in prosaic confusion. Their fall from grace, from the exaltation of sky and endlessness, of blue depth and the illusion that frosty clouds are warm cotton clusters; that they are cushion castles and do not house tomorrow’s storms and sudden, random electrical shocks.
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