CLXXX

The Sadness

I put on a brave face for everyone else

Why can’t I put on a brave face for me?

I sleep here in our bed

In our home

I dont sleep

I try to erase this word from my memory

Our, we, us

You’ve erased it 

Already

Took you a while to tell me.

I put on a brave face for everyone else

But to me I'm the saddest I've ever been

And I can't separate it out

Into losing you and losing us and losing me

Its all in there

The sadness in layers, upon layers

How will I sift down to the part where I'm losing me

And save it

While the rest is erased

Erased so easily.

I pace the hallway that was ours

Run my finger along the bedsheets that were ours

Dunk my head under the shower head that was ours

And I cry

To me I'm the saddest I've ever been

But only to me

[Images: Grace Hartzel by Cass Bird, Unknown, Karmen Pedaru for Glass Magazine]

CLXXIV

There’s a reason we celebrate love the way that we do - weddings and anniversaries and valentines and roses for no reason at all - because as much as we live in a world that honours independence, and the power of one, of going it alone and making a lot of things happen for yourself; none of us can truly deny the sheer joy and great relief it is to find for yourself another human being who’s willing to give you every part of them, forever, and to take every part of you as theirs. We all want to be understood and if that’s what love is, understanding, then the surest critic can’t dismantle the innate human desire to be fully known, and fully loved. Maybe marriages fail because we can’t hold on to our independence and our deep desire for an other both. We must decide. And for some, the decision is harder than once thought, the fear of losing yourself a simple byproduct of a culture that tells you to be dependent is to be weak and to be resilient is to always have an escape plan hatched that only you know about. But it isn’t true. It isn’t true. Love cannot operate in such hostile terrain, it can only ever be a shadow of itself in such foreign territory. Love is brave - to love another truly is a brave act, and a noble one, noble in the way that self serving and self seeking never could be. There's a lie going around that too many hearts are breaking over - how many more can it take? Before we all awake, to love as the ultimate letting go and getting; the most selfless and rewarding; the truest act; the noblest pursuit; the only stealer of breath, still-er of a beating heart. To be independent, in truth, is to be alone. When will they let us know it?

[Image: unkown]

XXXV

I dread the mornings because they're where your absence finds me. Like a dark bird, like a damaged nerve, the mornings are when I feel that you are not there. And I can over come, and I can soldier on, and I can get up and start my routine and busy myself and wait for your return - which is glorious, by the way, and sweet as strawberries, and delightful as anything else in the world - but the mornings will always come. And the absence. And the longing. And the aching effort of quashing my resent and distracting my mind and soothing my heart with other pretty and wonderful things. Always, the morning comes. Always the absence.

But then, in the same vein, always the coming home. Without the one there is no other. This is the perspective I try so hard to hold.