There are so many things I want to say to you, so many I’d like to ask you. Instead, I let silence sit in the gaps between our speech, a little longer each time. I have not decided if I should say anything at all, for is it your answer that might free me or the opportunity to tell you of my take of our plunder? I am undecided, and whether it is both, neither, or some portion of one, I hold off. I am fearful of opening myself again. I am fearful of finding myself with the rug pulled out and resenting a girl who stood foolish as she watched it happen and fell to her knees again, eyes glassy and aware. It is this state, one of self-flagellation and yearning, I’d like to avoid. (poorly thus far) – watching these things happen knowingly and moving though the aftermath of emotions much more slowly than I admire. I do not want to resent myself for trying to love, especially in the moments love looks like frankness or desperation. I do not want to see myself unworthy of love so as you had treated me in my moments of boiling over. It was not the first time and will not be the last. For this I cannot hate myself.
The years past drift in my memory as dreams now. I cannot be sure anything happened. I am rebuilding the holes of myself left empty in your absence. Every You a lover gone to waste.
This week I reread my own writing and let it be someone I hadn’t originally wrote it of. For a moment this changed me and changed the pace of healing the mess we’ve made. How do we care for those we love? To care for another, in the fog of heartache and settling of parting souls? At times I fear my rigidity.
In the evenings I am haunted and vulnerable. Sobs, a respite in the choked-up, back-ordered mound of my feelings. The nighttime bedroom has dark windows that are shadowed with moonlight and I do not want anyone to see me this way, I disdain myself for the waste of my loneliness. I long not to be alone.
I struggle to accept the parts of myself that saw it all with you, parts that earnestly believed in an us across life. Nothing exists now. I shed my skin like a snake and come out as a baby. The memories only with me as if I watched them on a screen. Missing is a kind of suffering words do not contain. I use English too much to speak with, rather than use it to speak through. New song in the mix.
The sun will still rise and create that beautiful splatter of soft morning pink across the eastern mountains. I will see the buttes on the plain raise up in wintery willow purple and remember a part of me from back then I am not sure is real. I will think of you and struggle to pray for you. I may cry, and go on with the day. Summer will come again, but for now I will bear this. The weight of thousands of useless words and tears, I will bear. The smiles I can only offer to God, and loudly long for another who lights up with me the same. In the evenings, I will bear all this, and awake again tomorrow renewed by a dream more real than all these years.
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