Let it all come down
There are days that force experience onto you; like an avalanche of commuters raining on you when train doors open at rush hour. Or, a barrage of abuse from the driver you just overtook from the wrong side of the road.
You just find yourself there, taking it all; one blow after another, because you can see that this is meant to be. This is what is meant to happen. Experience is like that sometimes; you have little choice. You’re just standing around someplace in ‘life’, and along comes experience and shoves itself down your shirt. The less you struggle, the easier it’ll be.
There is no choice but to let it happen to you. This has been my SaturdaySundayMondayTuesdayandWednesday.
I am riveted to the floor of my life.
Reeling from the blows; trying to protest feebly with, “enough”.
Too stupid to understand the learning. Too injured to respond with anything but devastation.
But I get the point. No, I really do. So please Life, back the fuck off.
I have nothing of myself to give to you now.
Sagittarius in Retrograde
“Here we are at last face to face,
we have met,
we have lost nothing…”
- Pablo Neruda
For today and yesterday, the day before that and perhaps even for tomorrow, I have a poem.
It’s perfectly titled.So if you’re reading this now and you’re heart jumped a beat, you know it’s you I mean. For the little we shared and all of what we never got around to, this one’s for you:
Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back
by Jeffrey McDaniel
“I wanted you to be the first to know – Harper & Row
has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.
The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.
Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,
which certainly was one of a kind.
A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,
I surrendered my identity in your eyes.
Now I’m just like everybody else, and it’s so funny,
the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.
I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?
I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest
satellite dish in the universe, your smile
as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.
Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.
I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash,
how I once held the soft audience of your hand.
I’ve been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.”
Stand. Stay. Solve.
Lovely thing, how I wish you had.
Saudade
Saudade (pronounced [sɐ.uˈdaðɨ] or [sawˈdaðɨ])
Portuguese for a feeling of longing for something or someone that you love, and which is now lost.
Granddad. 400 year-old home. Ages 7 – now. Running. Breath. Health. Peerlessness. Boundless energy. Fits of giggles. Drinking water from running streams. First real kiss. Roses I grew, just that one time.
Help me with this list.
Yes, you. And you, and you too. It’s ours. It’s belongs to us all. There is more we have in common than we know. Who we used to be. What we long for – sights, sounds, smells. And the places that most let us feel like it was okay, truly okay, to be just ourselves. You know you have this, just like I do. Maybe it takes a little courage to go back there. It does, I know. But what if we held hands? What if I said, “It’s okay! Take the leap. Only thing is, the puddle’s behind you. But come on! Do it. I’m here. I’ve got you. I’ve got your hand in mine. Jump.
Tell me your Saudades and I’ll tell you some of mine.”
Image: Gustav Klimt (La Maternita)
The opposite of love is not hate.
Don’t you dare ignore me.
Not after you have drawn me in
fingered my feathers
and asked to be mine.
Choose to forget me, and I will shower you with abject petals of indifference.
Oh you will know what you have missed.
I will make it so.
From Close to Closure
‘I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her.
Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.’
- Neruda
Today I bumped into someone I knew from a long time ago. Someone whom I once cared for immensely and loved with a torridness often reserved for the kind of loves that that either die premature rockstar deaths, or live forever.
We were together only some months but in those few urgent, calendar bound days we probably immolated our little world a few times over with that rare passion and ultimately, each other.
It was a shock to my system when this love finally met its tragic end and I continued to reel under its intoxicating spell even months later. An analogy I once used likened me to a fast-spinning top dwindling to a giddy, wobbly stop.
It would be years before we would ever see each other again.
I heard later that she’d taken up with someone new soon after we parted ways, and that this was the ‘one; the love of her life, I believe. I remember reading a book some years after in which the protagonist laments his curse of love. The story goes that after having been with him, women would immediately go on to find their soul mates; the love of their lives. Of course this meant that every woman wanted to be with him… but not really. I thought I was a lot like that man. And at the time I heard of Abi’s new found love, I’d probably never felt more wretched.
Years passed and time nursed many wounds but I continued to carry with me the small vanity case that was my emotional baggage. The bag was empty save a vacuum that echoed a plaintive moan. A sound that emerged from a chasm of an empty, groaning belly hungry for closure, and therefore peace.
Many eastern religions imbibe the practise of a ‘proper’ set of mourning rituals which not only see the departed soul safely to the other side, but also ensconce the bereaved in a shroud of grieving that lasts anything from three to ten to thirteen or forty days. I understand why. This time is of essence to work through the process of grieving and healing, after which the mourner is better equipped to re-enter into the routine, commitment and chore of every day living. It had been perhaps forty months and I had had no closing ceremony, no mourning ritual. I realised that needed to see Abi again and lay my demons to rest.
I always get what I ask for, sooner or later.
We met. She had grown up and was glowing. In her radiance, she smiled politely and responded cordially. The past was never mentioned. The past was a four-letter word. The past, it seemed, had never happened. It wasn’t unpleasant. It felt more like something you got with a Happy Meal. Mildly amusing, plastic and entirely forgettable.
We met again. Then once more. Always by chance, it was, at a party, a club and then yesterday at a restaurant.
I stopped by the table and made the usual interrogative noises after health, work and weather. She made the usual sounds, namely ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘mm-hmm’ and ‘good’. And then I did something I will replay in my head and wonder about possibly forever. I asked her if we were ever going to have a conversation that went beyond monosyllables.
She looked me dead in the eyes and simply said, ‘no’.
I didn’t say another word. I just nodded and walked away for what I knew would be the last time.
You know what they always say – to be always careful of what you ask, for you just might get it? They’re right. They also say ask and you shall receive. Both are right. Both true. And my God, vanity cases are ugly.
‘Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer, and these are the last lines I will write for her…’
- Neruda
Twenty-Two Tears In Your Hand
~
all the world just stopped now
so you say you don’t wanna stay together anymore
let me take a deep breath babe
if you need me, me and neil’ll be
hangin’ out with the dream king
neil says hi by the way
i don’t believe you’re leaving cause
me and charles manson like the same ice cream
i think it’s that girl
and i think there are pieces of me
you’ve never seen
maybe she’s just pieces of me
you’ve never seen
well
all the world is
all i am
the black of the blackest ocean
and that tear in your hand
all the world is danglin’ danglin’
danglin’ for me darlin’
you don’t know the power that you have
with that tear in your hand
that tear in your hand
maybe i ain’t used to maybes
smashing in a cold room
cutting my hands up
every time i touch you
maybe maybe it’s time
to wave goodbye now
time to wave goodbye now
caught a ride with the moon
i know i know you well
well better than i used to
haze all clouded up my mind
in the daze of the why
it could’ve never been
so you say and i say
you know you’re full of wish
and your “baby baby baby babies”
i tell you there’s pieces of me
you’ve never seen
maybe she’s just pieces of me
you’ve never seen well
all the world is
all i am
the black of the blackest ocean
and that tear in your hand
all the world is danglin’…
danglin’… danglin’ for me darlin”
you don’t know the power that you have
with that tear in your hand
that tear in your hand
Why I love… Hafiz
Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly
Let it cut more deep
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
— Hafiz
Are you sure you want to delete your account? This cannot be undone.
It is a bit of a pain and comes with it’s own inconveniences, I know.
In some ways, it would have been easier to simply delete, undo, remove and readjust settings and keep my old Facebook account functional. But it would have been unbearable to have to sift through years of bitterness and experience.
Besides, even the best clean up jobs always, always leave behind residue.
To be fair, I did try. I said to myself I shouldn’t budge from here; shouldn’t be bullied by someone else’s insensitivity. Why should I? I have every right to be here too… I tried to make the best of whatever there was. But no, I couldn’t erase the past. And Facebook would not let me forget.
Among the ‘People I May Know’ was the suggestion of the person I had all but married; the one with whom I really did believe I would spend the rest of my life with… Facebook is intuitive like that. Right beneath that name was another. This belonged to the person with whom my erstwhile partner had had an affair. An affair, that I came to know of via… that’s right, Facebook; and which ultimately led to the complete and utter dismantling of my world.
Sheer poetry. And thank God, because really, this was my wake up call.
I went through the account and was appalled by the incomprehensible mass of data accumulated and recorded over the past five years. It was a virtual archive of love, loss and liberation and I was overwhelmed by the staggering bulk of baggage. You were everywhere. And then there was her. And the pictures, the messages, the emails, the comments. Then there were ‘friends’, whom one never saw or heard from and who all became nearly extinct during the worst catastrophes. The ‘friends’ that called you when they needed help or wanted to gossip, but who forgot you when there was a party to go to. Now, it’s been a while but I vaguely recall that not really constituting friendship.
Why God why, am I doing this to myself?
I realised Facebook, like so many other virtual communication and networking portals, was warehouse for a lifetime of emotional baggage. GMail says ‘Never delete another email!’ and Yahoo! responds by giving you expanded mailbox capacity. And Facebook, never, ever obliterates anything or anyone for good. Somehow, somewhere it will remind you of the very things you want to forget.
What did we do pre-Internet days? Yes I know, we saved letters but really, is there any comparison at all for the sheer volume of timestamped fetid exchanges that we keep forever? We forgot. Time happened and we moved on. We did not carry our waste with us.
Sometimes, new beginnings are best. ‘Part-broken, part-whole, we begin again.’
I wrote of them; I meant you.
‘This poem is the poem I am writing because we aren’t speaking, and it is making my heart hurt so bad, it is all I can do just to get up off the floor sometimes.’
- Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
Of course he was lying. Of course, he missed her. “Her presence was confounding as it was exhausting. But her absence meant a different world altogether -” The disquiet of quiet. A quiet worse than the worst, most stubborn silences which stole a smile. I do not understand.
“Look at these motionless clothes, lay your face upon her icy pillows. I can’t bear to. Can you? How can you bear it?”I look. I see a bed that betrays no passion. Linen uncreased, in mourning.
An ordinary pair of rubber flip flops now made romantic, an air of disenchantment about them: “They once lay at her feet, where I once lay.” But surely, it is foolishness to be talking of things. They are only things. They are not her.
“But they are her things and so I tell you all this.” I say nothing.
“To have her no longer sleep beside me is enough to set into motion the breaking of my heart. Now I must try to understand all over again.”
Of course he was lying. You never understand these things.
Oh love, I’ve lost much more than that…
“You’re not the same as you were before. You were much more… ‘muchier.’
You’ve lost your ‘muchness.”
- The Mad Hatter to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
Lesson Yet Unlearned
~
“Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience.
But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
Elizabeth Gilbert – Eat, Pray, Love
‘If something inside of you is broken, you must put it back together with your own two hands.’
~
“And yet, as happy as you are to be with her again, you know that you musn’t overburden her with your troubles, that you can’t expect her to transform herself into the divine surgeon who will cut open your chest and mend your ailing heart. You must help yourself. If something inside of you is broken, you must put it back together with your own two hands.”
- Paul Auster, Invisible
‘Love someone and mean it. It’s just that fucking simple.’ – (Why I love…) Bassey Ikpi
“I’ve never been easy. I will never be easy. I am a mad woman. I love just as insane. I’m flourish and reckless abandon. I prefer this. Match it or balance it. But don’t fuck with it.
Don’t get close enough to touch and the decide you need this to cool down. I don’t do cool. I’m fire. I’m heat. I’m match this or balance it out but get the fuck out of my way if you’re just trying to change it.
Love someone and mean it. It’s just that fucking simple. If you don’t love, then leave. If you don’t mean it, then move. Someone will. I promise you that. We all have shit to work on but that shit doesn’t mean we don’t get to be loved right the fuck now.”
- Bassey Ikpi
This post has been re-blogged from: http://whyimsingle.tumblr.com/
Bassey Ikpi blogs at: http://www.basseyworld.wordpress.com.
Look. I found someone just like you.
“I’ve always avoided fights. I make jokes instead. I tell people what they want to hear in order to avoid a confrontation. I pretend to want things I don’t want, and I pretend not to want things I do want.
No one gets hurt. Except me.
The lines are so crossed and blurred at this point that I don’t know what I want. I just know I want it to be easy.”
- Jill Davis
selfhatelovesyou
You don’t know what it’s like to have someone leave you. To feel thwarted each time you tried to reconnect; to be ignored for years and left for dead. You thought I hated you for leaving me. I thought so too. But it was me I hated.
I hated myself for being so bad you had to go. For driving you away by doing nothing but being myself.
It takes a rare kind of love; a stupid kind of courage to make your way back into their life and to love them with all you have knowing full well that they could leave you again. And probably will.
One Art – Elizabeth Bishop
|
Didn’t your mother warn you?
Listen to your mother.
(Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/44357407@N07/4527135081/)
‘Every time I hear that melody, something breaks inside.’ – Tom Waits
“No matter how many times I tell you she’ll break your heart, or how many times she does it, you’ll never give up. Why, you ask? Because you love her.”
- Great Expectations
“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it?”
The Sandman
“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it?
It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armour, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…
You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it.
They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore.
Love takes hostages.
It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind.
It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain.
I hate love.”
- Rose Walker in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman
~
“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”
* all quotes & illustrations copyright Neil Gaiman
Love, is always worth it
‘The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.’ - Jeanette Winterson
