Organised Love

I never thought I needed you until you held my thoughts, and suddenly the burden was off. You held memory for me, and I could trust things big and small in the space you gave me.

Still. I never thought I’d be this old. Not in years but in emotion and all that’s taking a toll. And it is strange, so strange, that it comes down to saying this:

Remember to love.

Remember to love yourself.

Remember to care.

Remember what made you.

Remember not to break.

When did I begin to forget?

When did it stop being second nature?

Life is like the first book I finished reading, and as I read on to the sequel, I must remember certain things. But it is difficult some days to wake up with the weight of all that’s yet to be done, pressing against me and pushing me down before I ever stand up. It is difficult to leave behind others.

Sometimes I want to be empty. Not to erase or fill myself with something else, but just to breathe in white, the blank sheet of a new leaf of paper, the rest before I begin the next chapter.

But I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust my mind; I think it will repress even love, because love has started to hurt.

And that’s when I met you. The one who gives me the freedom to let go. Who holds me without judgement and gives me back to myself when it’s time, when I am ready to take on the next line.

I give you all the things that make my life what it is, and you give me the assurance that I can survive every task.

Whatever makes the burden a little lighter, right?

Breaking the Rule

I have a rule these days.

When something strikes a minor chord, I wait for emotions to progress to a major chord before I let them sound.

Not this time.

Sometimes a sad song is a sad song, and you can't make it better. You can take what you want from it, but it will not change its tune or the way the ghostly fingers pluck at memory. 

Sometimes gone is gone, and there is nothing to be salvaged.

Sometimes bitter is bitter, and no amount of sweet nothings can dilute the somethings.

Sometimes a bad day is a bad day, and sleep is your only out of it.

Life itself is a sea of metaphors now: of longing and separation, and I could write them endlessly.

Mostly because I am terrified to undress their speakable coats. Because who can stomach their nakedness; I couldn't. 

Stay silent about the screaming images in your mind and speak instead of something similar, but not quite the same. 

Because there is no metaphor for this. There is no metaphor for watching the blood pool in hands that held me. For leaving a hospital from the back door when you came in the front. For driving at that ungodly hour, the irony ringing in my head that it was at ungodly hours when you taught me how, except this time, this time you weren't in the passenger seat--and it is the only time in my life I despised driving, as if it could have been different if I hadn't known how. 

No metaphor I can think of for watching cinders fly, but I remember thinking how you love steam engines. 

No metaphor for the weight of regret and the decisions that haunt. 

God, forgive me. 

The easiest thing in the world for me has been to be yours, "100%", like you said. The only love where I have never had to try because every act was carried out before it was thought, propelled from its force within. 

It is much harder now. To feel it, and to hit a wall with every want to act on it. This urge as though to run, but there's no path ahead. 

I don't know how to show this love now. But I'm trying. Every single day. 

It's possible to fall apart with a smile, I'll tell you that. To have breath knocked out then caught the next second. But that's the thing. It will be knocked out; I will fall apart. Again, and again, and again. As many times as I come back. 

But even a swinging pendulum eventually rests. 

Then, somewhere over the rainbow, where bluebirds sing, where troubles melt like lemon drops, I'll find you there.

The Secret Ingredient

I've had some tiring few days in a row, the kind that would have you believe opening a stubborn jar of jam is life expecting more emotional strength than you've got. And I can't say it isn't true, because I'm still very deep in the forest of such tight-lidded bottles.

I'll go hungry, I think, rather than open that cocky piece of...
But I know my anger runs deeper than appetite.
You see, I haven't been speaking to life.

If I really think about it, I've got a pretty tight lid on myself too. I've painted the outside, proclaiming sweet flavours you'd like to know. Just so I can sit on this shelf. Be back in the business.
But, and this is for your own sake, I stubbornly keep the lid on.

When I was younger, I read a book I should not have been reading. It spoke of emotions mixing into the recipe. It described the devourer's agony and ecstasy, transferred through the contents of an innocent enough meal but one prepared in the midst of a particular affliction.
Now I'm afraid of these ingredients. Of the conditions they were mixed in.  I cannot name plainly what's inside; they would be useless nouns missing secret adjectives you couldn't fathom unless you'd been there, partaking in their brewing.

I suppose life has become the meal I would like to have lived with those who made it what it is.
There is a banquet in front of me, and it is untouched whilst I sit alone. And I see the stares and I hear the whispers: what a waste, and what a shame. 
But I have simply lost my appetite.

Unchoosing

A paper boat does not carry you through a storm just as a house of cards cannot stand in the wind.
It was magnificent while it lasted of course.
Colourful, alluring, pretty to look at.

Then the winds began and the rain fell, and all my words bled into elements beyond control.
I’m tired of dreams; I’m tired of their ethereality while my heart is subject to the physicality of being alive in form.
The most vivid imagining is sometimes not enough; just ask the Little Match Girl.

But the world doesn’t hold the form I long for.
So I strike match after match after match, letting moments of pretend keep me alive.
For now.

Because the alternative is darkness. The alternative is ending instead of finishing (there’s a difference).
I could never choose to live in this reality that became a mistake the moment you were gone. I’m incapable of it.
But while I’m here, while there’s work to be done, the way I carry on is through little acts I call unchoosing. There is nothing I could want now, but I know what I don’t want.  And that makes the choice for me indirectly.

Do I have it all figured out?
Certainly not.
Each act is the strike of a match; they are limited, and they will end, but perhaps by then they would have lit some lasting kind of flame.

Survivor's Guilt

As constantly evolving creatures, our biggest folly lies in our expectation of another being remaining the same. The same as when we met them. The same, before life changed. The same…

What does it mean to survive an ordeal?
It is a storm of rapid, violent change; you will not be left the same.
To have survived does not ensure intactness of who you used to be.
Surviving never promised preservation.

Because how could you not be completely destroyed by the event?
How could you possibly continue?

The simple answer is that you don’t.

You are glass that cracked, shattered, was melted, and came out changed in new form.
You are made of the same stuff, but the glass blower’s breath has pushed the experience so deep into the essence of you, you carry the weight of its blow.

It is this new version, solidified, that is able to endure what you never could have before.
It is this creature, remembering, that pretends lighter days around outer forms yet unchanged.

And for once the mask of memory is a bit of aid while rough shards in unsettled edges take the time to smooth themselves out against some remaining purpose.
One tries very hard not to give in to the fall,
the one brought about by this imbalance,
this weight of absence,
this shift from all that stopped being there.