Amongst paper renditions of the Drowned and the Saved, Unspeakable Truths, Shattered Voices and other written fires of the human hells that exist on our earth, I am sorely nostalgic today. Perhaps it is the conversation today between a best friend who is now nearly a stranger, talking to the first love of my life about weather, folded between flat, fanatic expressions of hurt, missing, rawest regret. Perhaps it is the realization of all that I have left behind and yet what still awakens me at dawn, when I must remind myself of the cruelest of consequences. A first message this morning reminding me that I had killed our dreams.
There are things, within this, within us that I can never speak about now, that I try to say, but ashamed, shocked really, I cannot let out of my lips. And behind these shades that are mine alone, in this country untouched by this past, I feel somehow more exposed to that world: wounds ripped open by sudden rains or the scent of wood on someone's breath.
Growing up, that was what I gained, a slippage forward from being certainly spoiled, from an inability to care for even daily needs. I am hardly afraid anything else. But I lost so much more: from the mountains, the red brick abode to the heart of it all: the softest part of me. The hand that removed my glasses when I slept, the arguments of remote controls and frozen toes. An achingly innocent promise.
And, as friends are friends, and true to me, they reassure that it was the right step. That I merely made few mistakes. They forgive me in a way that I know I should not be forgiven.
I don't know how to say I'm sorry, in a real and lasting way, to him or to myself. I don't know how to release us both from the strangling grasp of our attachment, to believe wholeheartedly, to stop us both from grasping desperately into the last years, to remember only the laughing and the not the wrenching. I don't know how to say goodbye.
But this grasping, this gasping for something else, is moderated by a new home; by day-dreaming; by feeling again; by forgiving other, more recent, hurts; by returning, rebuilding, rewarding my most sensitive self; by letting in and slowly, slightly, if only sometimes, letting go.
