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.