~~ Love After Love ~~

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

We spend our lives running after people and dreams to make them give us some worth, love us, treasure us. But what we don't do is give ourselves the same. I have always believed, if only we gave ourselves half the worth that was denied to us by that someone significant behind whom we ran all out lives, yet never got a quarter of what we gave away, we could be so much better humans, happier humans, contented humans. The piece just reinstated that all over again.

The space that I can call mine is so small that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all around me are sketches for sculptures, small drawings that seem like moths fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from this tiny space. Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve them and stunt their growth.

Of course, some people, me included, believe that punk is just the most recent manifestation of this, this spirit, this feeling, you know, that things aren't right and that in fact things are so wrong that the only thing we can do is to say “Damn It”, over and over again, really loud, until someone stops us.

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for him. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?

He had said something interesting: he said that he thinks there is only free will when you are in time, in the present. He says in the past we can only do what we did, and we can only be there if we were there.

I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.

I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?

I converse with my conscience most of the time.
"Do you ever miss him?"
"Every day. Every minute and every breath I take", I say.
Every single minute. Yes, it's that way, isn't it?

"Is it better to be extremely happy for a short time, even if you lose it, than to be just ok for your whole life?"
It comes out so quietly that I have to ask her to repeat it: "It’s just that I thought maybe you feel you were married to him."
"It's hard being left behind. I wait for him, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one who stays."

"How does it feel?
It feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any clothes. And you've left your wallet at home.
When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true.

I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness, dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say “I am sorry”, until its as meaningless as air.

I smile in an exhausted but warm sort of way, as though I am a brilliant sun in some other galaxy.
Everyone likes me that way.