washwords

you’re going through all this” you tell me. “I hope these things move out of your life soon.”

As if I’m a stranger. As if you are. As if these things that have moved into my life fell from the sky like raindrops, irritating, but soon to pass.

I ponder, write and rewrite how to respond. Knowing I won’t get any closures, answers, epiphanies. Knowing I should let it go, be the bigger person, move on.

But the thing is, there WAS something you could do to help. You could have told me about her. You could have not gone on the trip. You could have been “honest, honest, honest” like your profile STILL on the site reads. You could have been open to the possibility of loving me, or at least not needed adoration, admiring disciples so much.

And the question, unfaceitious, unhysterical, completely sincere remains. Why?

I hope you will tell me the rest before it hits. Like a truck. From nowhere. Again. From police reports or message archives (that turn my stomach!) or the gods at Lexis.Nexis. I expect that you won’t, but I must ask all the same.

From the windows of the car, the slush and rain reflects gray back to me, to the world and back again. I have behaved so poorly. Outrageously, even my therapist agrees. “Why are feelings so important?” she asks me. What else is, I wonder.

I try to stamp down, shut out the pervasive green sea-monster that rises and grows inside me. I try to see it for what it is, a monster, a demon, an addiction – like heroin, she says, that I must resist, that I must quit cold turkey. But something about it is soft and soothing, Muppet-like and reminiscent of girlhood rainy days warmed by books and cozy lights.

So maybe I shouldn’t think of it as a green monster, this omnipotent jealosy, this seething rage. I picture thunderstorms, hurricane me as a colleague once called me after a short rage-filled elevator ride with me. I picture demons, heroin, murderers, poison, venom, steely jagged hurts.

I don’t do it to punish myself. That’s not where the weakness lies. I do it in the hopes of jolting, shaking myself into submission with the horror that these are things my heart contains.

I do it so I can stop. Stop lashing out at the ones I love. Stop judging, presuming the worse, filling with hate and with fear. Stop sabotaging, willfully breaking and twisting the most important and precious of bonds. I do it to stop hurting, hating, spinning, twisting, aching. I do it to stop, to turn off the engines, shut off the motor, curtail spinning wheels, retract all moving parts back into their shell.

I picture the horrors of my heart over and over, in more fantastic and terrifying ways all just to stop moving, clear a path, and try to find the still, calm, deeper me. I do it because I am curious — behind all this swirling, spinning fury, what will I find? I’m afraid to say it outloud but I’m hopeful there’s a stiller stronger loving me in there, a girl I’m sure I once knew.

Dear _____,
Today I walked through a misty silver forest, knee deep in orange and brown fallen leaves, past stone walls, tinkling sheep, laughing baking villagers,

and I thought:

You should be here.

and I laughed over vino and gateau basque in espanol/anglais/francais, and I was golden, delighting people, the way I once did you, walking over velvet lush rolling hills, the softest place I’ve ever seen.

I missed you.
and you
missed me.