Petting Happiness.

I reach to pick you up but you are faster than me. You quickly sprint away and I feel saddened not knowing if you run because you are afraid of me or just don’t love me the way I love you.  I don’t understand why you don’t know that I only want to hold you gently in my hands while I affectionately caress you and pet you.

I continue to wait for you to reappear happy again. I wish you would show yourself to me. You need to be the one because I am paralyzed and unable to move forward or even raise my arms up to grasp for any floating shards of glass hope.  I try to avoid the hate I have for myself by looking away from the mirror when the sudden ugly haunting image shows itself in my reflection. I tightly close my eyes and think of something else when the thought of you enters my mind.  I have become very good at ignoring the pain I have inflicted upon myself and on you for that matter, but the guilt from my paralysis resurrects your spirit all too often and I feel worse than before.  If I continue to hesitate and do nothing, I risk you never coming back and yet knowing this, still, I am unable to avert such a disastrous outcome and I still don’t know if it is right that I should go find you.  Should I go find you? Should I go find you? I can hear in the distance, laughter and ridiculing voices, probably from the audience watching as I am chided by the ghosts lurking from behind a tree across a churchyard field. There are many more ghosts now after seven months and I am, all the time now, starting to hear the individual voices of unknown spirits in the crowd. At times, they quietly remind me and other times they are relentless.  I know you are still out there and I would walk over to you but I am wearing mud covered shoes and the weight of my every step pulls me into the earth and the more I fight the gravity of the quicksand, the harder the earth pulls me into it, deeper, as if trying to rest me in my grave.  I am not ready to rest but I’m also not ready to walk to you.

Are you any resemblance to the strong person I once knew you to be with your carefully rehearsed words spoken with your sharp cutting tongue, the owner of my scars?  I really do try to look away from these ugly sights.  I cast my eyes down but then I see all too clear again the hell waiting for me every time I remember the fatal blow to us.  It isn’t enough to say that you or I have moved on and you have probably found happiness that for so many years danced around you just beyond your reach.  And, very much like Jazz, happiness was all too quick for you to pick up and hold and you have to wonder if it avoids you because it is scared of you or because it doesn’t love you the way you love it.

Happy Birthday to me.

You should be commended and your private devotion revered in remembrance of the total power you have and yes, it’s all too visceral. A memorial to your wicked inclination and the deep, cruel scars left in my mind, my special friend. Midnight wakes up the memories. Are you recalling with grotesque pleasure the pain inflicted by your cast iron range of hatred and your four words leaving their mark?  Are you forgetting what you’re supposed to be doing?  Your words will never pass and I hate being the fragile leftovers.  If I don’t soon forget, I may die from the strain of remembering because when the sound of your words die, their spirit lives on vibrating in my memory.  Please give me the charity of silence from those days.

I wasn’t altogether expecting a call from you nor would I presume it appropriate but perhaps you are more like a severed limb; I still feel you there. I had hoped for at least a note.  By 10 p.m., after which it was becoming apparent that I wasn’t going to hear from you in any fashion. No letter, no card, no email, no phone call, no swimming pools, no toasts into the night, no Mozart, no telepathic whispers delivered to me while I slept – because I didn’t sleep.

I understand that change is necessary.  I accept that for the most part.   I wish I could forgive myself for every idea I’ve ever had in which I was paralyzed and did nothing about it. The alienation of you versus us, I noticed but did all I was capable of doing. I’m sure the same is true for you.  Sometimes you are a collage of vivid flashbacks interrupting my day and constantly estranging me from the future.  I was hoping that the change we are experiencing would be the beginning of something new, not the end of something old. I wish you would think about that and decide, not if, but how our lives are supposed to include each other. We will both miss out on what was probably our original calling. 

There is this feeling of deprivation left by the void of your hatred and accusations.  A total absence of something that was normally present.  In so far as I might deny what it is, I am obsessed to fill the emptiness and finish serving my time.  The sorrow may be all mine but I’d like to think you must still be nursing your hatred and tears and that there will be some day I’ll be called there again.

A redeemed captive.

You are made of beautiful glass. To touch your smooth painted flesh, you are of crystal brilliance.

 

I saw the tears rise up in symphony from the lower depths of your heart and gather in your eyes.  Those were not idle tears but the wearily scurrying of your peace in frantic doubt. Where there was once darkness, the splintering of small cracks in your heart shines an unfamiliar light and tries to turn your despair into hope.

 

We must atone for our past by suffering and then it is important that we be finished with it.  Our treasures rest on the back of haunted memories that have been the fabric of our souls for so long. How scary to unravel the first string. All the arguments and all the laboring, just to convince us that we may live very happily beyond a bitter pardon. And, after a great pain, a warm feeling comes over us as our nerves ceremoniously extinguish the fire in our blood. Your words of grief I feel. You should pay attention to that. I know sometimes I even hold my own grief half to my heart because I am half in love with it. Better to have pain than paralysis.

 

I hope you reach out with your hands and capture the peace that has been eluding you and hold it up high so I can see it.  Look before and after this moment. I know you pine for those whom you don’t have.  But if you could shed the burden of the tyranny over your insecurity and not just shifting it to the other shoulder, then maybe you will begin to trust that you can be the happy person whom you lost contact with long ago.  When your change approaches, impressions will weaken and you will learn how to exist with those whom you miss. Even though you existed before, you may be discovered for the first time.  As their blame is replaced by their captive interest in opening the gate and looking into your newly planted garden, and as they replace the anger of forgotten kisses and hugs, they may see with new vision, their new existence in your new life.  Please be near me when I change.

No title.

I haven’t forgotten you.

Like snowflakes in the North Carolina spring, I watch you fall from heaven and then dissolve into a tear upon touching the earth. One moment, there you are, not like a pure virtue but definitely white and floating down to me. Such scant light shines between each flake in a blizzard of happy memories and then you fade away, gone as soon as you touch the surface. The beauty of a flake is guaranteed and never forgotten but sometimes missed.

I guess you can not consume happiness without creating it. I watched you fade away while I was accused of pushing you away. What you have never known, the fever and fret and my strength pales today. Your leaden-eyes of despair and thoughts so sorrowful and I’m to blame for your frozen heart. What I have not seen before is the gradual day awakening and the will still there. I am only half here right now but that’s only half to suffer. Believe me when I say that the suffering may be inconvenient but it is also magnificent.

There is a lasting legacy of this terrible tragedy. In the depths of our hearts are the tombs collecting the existence of pain we buried. I am not so lost that I forgot everything hiding down there.

I haven’t forgotten you.

Our conversation.

I said you should have come over to my playground and joined me in the swing. You said you wanted to come find me wherever I was but you needed to devote some time to get there.

I said I had a big salt shaker full of magic dust and when sprinkled onto your plight gave out hope and could make you fly. You said you were already on the ledge and asked to borrow my wings.

I said to bury your worries and I knew of a small church graveyard. You said a prayer and asked to borrow my shovel.

I said everything around me seems to be disappearing. You said only the clouds.

I said I climbed Sentimental Mountain. You said it must have really been lonely up there.

I said I sit in a quiet room where none of my paintings have frames. You said this isn’t your penance.

I said my heart is divided. You said half to you and the other half to destiny.

I said I wanted to know the purpose of us. You said the purpose was to be here today.

I said I wasn’t sure I had the ability to love. You said that legendary monster was captured years ago.

I said be with me. You said those are mere words, open your eyes.

A Paltry Penance.

 

I have known sickness before but this is much harder now that I am older. This continuing sense of rolling nausea. One pill can turn the lights out and I slowly start to leave us. At times I have just enough time to say goodbye.   At first it was a rising and falling in gentle slopes. Undulating billows that sway me from side to side yet I can’t seem to gain momentum from the healing supposedly taking place.  Wretched vile moments of loss of control and contemptible moments of misery and sickness. Another suffering night spent as a prisoner of a spinning bed. I call out in pathetic piteous appeals for help. The distorted truth in my head and the never ending pain. An old friend said to free myself from requital and pardon my daemons.

I spoke to an old friend.

 

I spoke to an old friend last night who told me those sunken tracks and affections I hold in that old dirt road are getting a little deep. She said perhaps it’s time to get out of the mire and venture onto a new road and make new ruts to a new place.

 

The vast extent of my space and time are one fathom apart from my winter.  You know that to be true if you really listen quietly and think back. She cried thinking I was overwrought but I assured her I would focus on my true troubles.

 

It was just a deep penetrating cut to a depth that you know only one person could wound me like that. Those deep valleys and those deep speculations from your far reaching weapon.  Some day I will leave the flesh of my trance and devotion because that extends onto your hallowed territory. You are cunning with your fragile feeble cries.  As time passes my spirit thins and my efforts are less sincere.

 

Be with me.

You are the brightest hour of my day.

What would make me happy, or happy as close as true happiness goes, is sharing a table at a coffee shop, next to the window, while outside it rains, laughing because you just made a joke and you think it’s hilarious, planning a trip to the mountains because the best dreams always contain strawberries.

I probably see you as Monet would but I also cherish your spiritual existence. You’re with me. Sometimes you’re actually with me in my car or when I’m home alone brushing my teeth. You’re always somewhere in the framework of my thoughts.

Thank you for showing me your trap door, the door no one else sees. Thank you for pouring my drink every night. Thank you for pouring my coffee every morning. Thank you for kisses on the lips before going to work. Thank you for handing me back my heart. Thank you for being with me.

No worshipers and empty pews.

 

I talk silently and anonymously to you in these letters. They are written from some inner and private corridor of my heart that leads to an empty church. These letters are meant to salvage what I can from a life some argue has been nothing but empty lyrics of a grief stricken song I play tirelessly over and over. Have I abandoned myself?  What may be incomprehensible to some is nothing short of an accumulation of incipient ideas to others. But still, they tell me to write and so I write almost everyday.

 

I look forward to you returning although it will never be the same.  Sometimes it feels as if my heart separates from my soul when I think about how everything ended.   Your hatred of me pulled away any solid ground from beneath my feet and left me wretched.  It has taken me a long time to secure myself on this thin ice. You’ll never know your effect on me. I’m not sure you will ever care.

 

You’ve changed me.

 

Never mind the pins and needles. Open the curtains so I can climb out on the ledge and fly away. Indifference now and nothing has changed. I just can’t make that call or write that letter, especially not in the silence of a single hour.  Wonder if you even expect it.  You know I don’t read minds well.  I never have and I will never try. 

 

You came to me and I could not reach your grasp. Finger tips apart mean miles in separation. A close scrutiny of the past reveals a thousand gifts given to us.

 

If we were friends, I would tell you things.

 

We would have made great friends but that dawn is a thousand miles away.

 

Falling shadows

Among all the great occurrences in my life, I’m sure it was by some God-like twist of fate that I should happen to meet you. You were a gift from a friend of mine who felt I had suffered enough of my ordinary life.

If I had to paint a self portrait, there would have been no paint on the canvas. I can remember the days when you were unreachable, unattainable and a beautiful dream I cherished. Let it be you who put the paint on my canvas.

The incessant urge of wonder, the flight, the chase, and the beliefs never lessened. I spoke of no illusions to complicate my life, however, if one day life finds us in some particular way with you there and me here, perhaps we can prove my long theory about how hearts can change.

Broken with emotional scars, you are better than perfect. I wished on a thousand stars for you but none of those wishes matter now because we are brushing off the dust and clearing a path. I will build a monument with all my feelings for you near the edge of our path. I am never daunted by all the static of others and with the abrupt shift in our direction; we are not totally without a center.

Ignore those low drones of thoughts evading your haunted mind. Sitting here between the mountains and the sea, how wonderful for us to have awakened from being wrapped in the arms of the night.