for the love of loss

How strange to be loved by one who would tear at your flesh with words. How incomprehensible, incongruent, the truth and the tale. ‘You learn much of one when you say no.’ I wasn’t braced for the impact of disillusionment. I thought I was held tight by our cosmic fate. I believed there was no heart that could love me the same, no eye that could see, no mind that could know. Stranger. Perhaps I’m as foolish as you believed. Or perhaps I clung too tightly to the best of you. 

Perhaps letting go of something means being alive to witness the changes. The changes the changes. And we’re not even into the second act! Someone hold my hair back. Never mind, I cut it.

Sheer belief in the divine unknown will grant miracles, for those who seek to know themselves and love what they find are granted heaven on earth. We’ve done away with cults and brainwashings. We return to the ground soil and the high winds. They whisper, nay shriek! with answers to the questions we lose ourselves in. 

Loss eats the stomach in a way hunger merely grazes. Loss traps you in time, suspends you in the haze of what once was. Every inch of the world feels a trap. 

I have watched a soul leave this world for the next. I clung to garments that carried her smell. I listened only to the music she loved for it carried her heart. I watched my father cry for his mother. I watched him break down at her funeral. I watched loss bring a family together and leave a hole in the room. There was an empty seat. Someone was missing. Someone would never return to that seat. I wish they would. She wanted to hear me sing; perhaps that’s why I do. 

I have watched a soul twist and writhe in the pain of abandonment. I clung to the silence for help. I watched myself be betrayed. I watched the world keep going and disappear someone. There was a quietness where someone once spoke. Someone was missing. Someone might never speak again in a place where I could hear it. I wish they would. Someone wanted peace; perhaps that’s why I protect mine.  

It’s quite the predicament, love. To be in love means to abandon logic and reason as it were taught, as it exists in ones head, and meet the moment with an openness. I have met many moments with protection, unideal for a nature so delicate. GUARDS! SIEZE YOURSELVES AND LEAVE! Oh but they couldn’t after what happened last time! And the time before that! And look around at what happens to others! They simply couldn’t bear it. 

And yet the world keeps turning. There is no stop or pause, no relief anytime whatsoever. Only a steady pressing on, a darkness followed by light, season after season. I choose to love out of principle, not reason, for the sake of being one who chooses to love again. The reward is in the way your day romances you. The way she shines a light on a drop of dew on a tenderly green leaf. Only the eyes of a lover will see light dance on the rocky face of the waterfall, moss caress an elderly tree, small bugs carry big crumbs home to their families, clouds form and reform and shape shift and disappear. A lover will see these moments and know in their heart that the world was made for them to love and be loved. 

Sometimes I see myself curled up in the palm of my hand and know that I am loved. and held. and safe.