In Silence

How do I help you know
to believe, to see
that you are not to blame
for me?

Where are the words
that could help you hear
that only your love
kept me going that year?

How do I make
the shape of my soul
visible
so you can see
how much your love
has changed me

You couldn't have loved me better
I couldn't have loved you more

I couldn't have loved you better

You couldn't have loved me more

My heart breaks anew every time
I see the new glimmer in your eyes
dampen and grow dimmer
my untidy reflection
causing you sorrow and pain
my best friend in the world

How do I find the words
to tell you how sorry I am
that I didn't love you better,
that I didn't love you the way you needed,
that I didn't give you more,
that I didn't help you up sooner,
that I didn't make you better,
that I didn't let you in deeper,
that I didn't have the words,
that I didn't know how to be anyone but me,
and that I couldn't have loved you more

How do I tell you, the inside-you,
that you are one of
the strongest and most
beautiful women that
I've ever met
that you are capable
of so many incredible things
in this world
if you only believe it yourself

How do I tell you that
the light that shines from your heart
could make shadows flee
from countless dark corners
and that I know this
as it has chased away mine

For someone who thinks herself
so verbal
so wordy
so talkative
screams come out in silence
and when I reach for words
they duck away from my tongue
hiding in the shadows
and never come
only tears
quiet, lonely, slow, sad, heavy tears

There are no words

and silence is what I'm left with

Wheels turning

Sorrows building

Heart loving

Eyes crying

Soul sighing

Lungs crushing

Silence

I Remember, and I Will Always Remember

      It's early and the blankets are pulled up over my head. There's a cat sleeping on my chest and I am happily trapped, snug, safe and warm in my bed. The scent of you is on the pillow my face is buried in as I drift and dream.
      Aw crap, the phone is ringing, "damn phone, frickin' racket, who is calling this early in the stupid morning, ugh," and I fumble around, my arm slapping around the bed to locate the source of noise that's pulled me from my sweet dreams. You're on the phone in your 'tough voice' being all business-like telling me that there's been an attack on the US and that you're not coming home, they're not letting you leave the base and you're dagging up in 24hrs. In my sleep I think this joke isn't very funny and I hang up on you, kinda angry, but mostly asleep. Since you were a patient man you called me back again, "no babe, you've gotta wake up, wake up now! and listen to me, it's important and I'm not playing around - now sit up."
      My heart falls into my stomach as I push the tangles of hair out of my eyes, and tendrils of the conversation from minutes before wind their oily selves around my tender, loving, naiive, open-hearted mind. I start crying, wrapped in disbelief and confusion. Terrorists... in the US... plane crash... explosions... the WTC... "Terrorist attacks? What? There are no terrorists here. Wait, what are you saying?! What happened? Oh my God, this isn't real, and I'm still asleep, that's it isn't it?" "No babe, this is real, you aren't asleep, and I'm not going to be able to come home for awhile babe, I can just come get some stuff this afternoon, but I can't really talk to you any more about it when I get there..." "You're not coming home? What do you mean you're not coming home? They can't do that! Your toothbrush is here, you can't leave without your toothbrush, they can't just up and make you leave..."
      Your toothbrush, it's silly but I remember the conversation clearly, and it was like you didn't even blink. You had 4 hours in the afternoon once orders were confirmed to come home, grab your gear, say goodbye, and get back to base to be ready to leave. Your voice is so strong on the phone, my heart aches to have you with me, beside me, telling me it will all be okay, but all I really want to do is throw up. I refuse to do a thing until you get here, until you're home and I can see you, talk to you, look in your eyes, kiss you. I begin padding around the house in my bare feet, my robe pulled tightly around me and my mind racing as I spend the next 2 hours feeling helpless and lost, half-listening to the news trickle in over the radio little by little i this new and altered reality of my life. What were they playing on the radio? I don't remember, did they stop the music that day? Was it only news? I don't know. I walk in circles and circles and circles, around and around and around the house waiting for you to come home. I hear your key in the lock and I rush to the door to throw my arms around you.
      You looked different, your eyes are hard, softening for a moment when you pull me tight to your chest. "Come on babe, we've gotta get my kit n' shit together." I don't want to help you gear up, I want to have a tantrum to make you stay, stomp and scream and cry until you promise not to leave. I have a billion questions that you aren't allowed to answer. I hate the army again. I have no idea where you are going, what you are going to be asked to do, and when you will be coming home. As surreal a time as it was, I had no idea at this point the extent of chaos that reigned within places I always imagined to be safe, impermeable. All I knew was that I wanted you with me.
      You being always prepared, it didn't take us long to pull your stuff together. I'm sure I've barely blinked and now you are heading out the door. You give me a quick squeeze and a kiss. "Don't you dare say goodbye to me (though I know that you never say goodbye when you're leaving this way), you just come back safe. You be strong, and you come back safe to me. Oh, God I love you... I love you," and the door closes. I lean my forehead against it, choking back my sobs so you don't hear as you leave. I am proud of you for being who you are. I am proud of your strength, your determination, your sense of honour and committment to what you believe in. I am glad you are going to be there to help the people that needed you, to help sort through the confusion, wherever they were sending you. I will wait here, I will be strong for you, safe at home until you come back to me.
      Many years have passed since that horrible day, and not one day goes by without thoughts of you, without sending you love out into the big blue. Thank you for being so strong, for being so patient, and for coming home safe to me after those awful days apart. Though I lost you anew to a different(?) terror and my own fumbling indecision, I will always remember. I will honour the things you believed in, the things that were planted deep, hung up high for all to see on the flagpole of your heart.
      For all those who were not so lucky, those who lost someone this day not so many years ago, I will look at their photos again when I can find them, I will read their stories again, and I will remember, to keep even a small part of them here safe at home.

My Attic Door

for safekeeping
for I'll-think-about-it-later-because-I-can't-bear-another-minute-of-it-right-now
for careful, don't lose it this time,
for safe harbour
for out-of-sight-out-of-mind
I put things away
in the attic

last time I put the treasure away
wrapped round with a delicate purple scarf
nestled in with the tiny plastic dancer
latched tight in a small white box
at the bottom of a chest
in the room piled high with chests of treasure
where the dust settles to cover my footprints
as the door is closed
and locked behind me
but my attic door
never stays closed,
even when I'm sure
I locked it
the things put away
can be found in places
where I know
I did not leave them
that is if they can be found again
at all
like love...
last spring I put it away
somewhere safe
wrapped in that soft purple scarf
so it wouldn't get lost
so I could think about it
so I could keep it
and get back to it later
when things were different
or different-er
but I forgot just where I put it
to keep it safe

then I remembered the spot
and rushed back to reclaim it
but the wisps and tendrils had escaped
sneaked out through the cracks
leaving the locket
empty

perhaps I need to look
at getting
that old lock
fixed
clear out
some of
what's waiting for later
because time
really doesn't
matter

Only Questions...

? How do you move forward when you part of you knows the answer to a question, part of you blinds itself to it, and you're too scared to act on it?

? What do you do when you've made changes to what you need and what you seek from a relationship so that you can live well enough within it, and then the other half of your relationship later wants to return to what it was before, or could have been, when you can't?

? What do you do when that happens too late, and in making those changes you let go of wanting, needing, or welcoming any of those connections?

? How do you keep on top of the aching sorrow and grief that threaten to smother you after your every half-hearted smile, every silent reply, every swallowed tear?

? How long do you drift along waiting to see if you feel differently, when you don't?

? How do you look in the eyes of the person you love, the eyes that scan and seek for any thread of hope in your own, without giving away the depths of grief and loneliness you harbour in your heart?

? When is listening to the gentle voice inside you that tells you "enough now, it's time" the courageous thing to do, rather than the cowardly thing to do?

? How do you say "there's nothing you can do, there's nothing you can say," to the one who is trying to do, and say, and be, everything?

The Drive

3 years ago in a whirlwind I got married, to a woman (surprising everyone, including myself!) I fell in love with almost overnight. She was joyful, inspired, excited about life, and so happy to be with me. We both had our “stuff,” but we were great together. Just being with her made me feel wonderful, a bright star in the sky, and we spent every available second together. In a matter of a few short months, she became my best friend, my lover, my confidante, my partner in life. It seemed at first that there was nothing we couldn’t do, if we did it together. We dreamt of a future together, painting one another pictures of what it might look like, how things might go. We talked about the way we had personal natures that could cause us to part, to drift away from one another into another lane, to live our lives independently while seeming to be side by side, and how it would be a daily choice, independent and in love, to be together.

The longer we were together, the bumpier the road she travelled seemed to become, and I watched her drift to drive along the shoulder, and then off alone on small, dark, overgrown side roads that eventually led her back to the main road, a little worse for wear, sometimes exhausted and scared, but still driving. I felt like I could offer the occasional lift, help mend a flat tire here and there, give the odd hand-up, but for the most part it seemed that she had to deal with the bumps and side tracks herself. In the beginning when I got a flat, or my windows got to dirty to see through, she would be there to help fix it up, get me back on the road again. I counted on her to be there.

As time went on her detours became longer and a bit more frequent. Increasingly, there were times she was too busy working just to keep herself on the road, and she didn’t seem to notice that I was only limping along in the lane, my tires making that heavy flap flap-flap noise they make when they’re flat. After awhile I came to realize that I couldn’t just wait for her to get there to help me fix things. I could see that it took a lot of effort for her to keep her own self on the road, and I started to take care of those other things myself. I learned new ways to patch tires, different methods of keeping the windows cleaner, and the headlights pointed in the right direction. Later when she was back up and running and wanted to help I was happy to see her, but there were fewer and fewer times when I looked for her to help, happy just to drive along beside her when we were both on the same path at the same time.

At first when she wasn’t beside me, I found myself jumping the tiny meridian, wildly and desperately yanking her back from the shoulder when I thought she was too close to the edge, away from the scary roads that were overgrown and dark, back into the lane beside me. Over time I learned that she needed to pull away a bit, for awhile, needed to drift through the dark and damp shadows that lined the side roads, and felt myself drifting as well. When on my own I worried about her, saw her eyes bleaken the further she got from me as the shadows set in. I drifted in my own lane, closer, farther, closer, farther, experimenting with how I felt with more and less distance between us. I needed time and space for myself too. Sometimes I would be in sight when our roads reconnected, other times I was off drifting along my own side road, returning to our drive after a time, at least in part.

As we each drifted and jolted about in our own lanes, I noticed that our shoulders became further apart as each of our lanes widened, and the dividing meridian became wider and higher each time, accommodating the wandering, the distances that grew between us, protecting us from crashing into one another when our paths came back together again. Each time this happened, when she was back in sight of me, or I was back in sight of her, we would try to resume the drive as best we could. We talked about the time spent apart, what was learned, what was lost, what was discovered, and what was uncertain, trying to look together anew to a redefined future.

Sometimes I was angry that she had left me alone and hadn’t been there to help me. I was sad that she hadn’t let me in to help her make it easier, or asked for help somewhere else. I was resentful that I had to take care of our things on my own, and that I had to labour alone keep the meridian from becoming overgrown and the shoulders clear enough for us to reconnect through. I was disappointed that the things I had allowed myself to believe about our future weren’t coming to be, and I was brokenhearted to have to let them go. Once I allowed those feelings to pass, I took to planting flowers in the widening meridian, clipping the hedges that ran along the shoulders, distracting myself with making the drive more enjoyable when I was alone. I remembered that it wasn’t her job to make me happy, that was my job, and I needed to start doing it.

Upon each return she talked and talked and talked about all the construction she was going to do, all of the modifications she was going to make to tune up her engine. I was hopeful that when she made those changes she wasn’t going to need to take so many detours, or that they might be less dark, less might be stolen from her, from us, in those times we were apart. I was excited about seeing more of the woman I first married, and returning to being more of the woman I was when we were first married. After some time though, I came to see that though the construction and modifications were things of her deepest desire, her truest heart, they were not things she could reliably act on. Changes would begin to come through, she started to do some things differently, and I got excited each time: hopeful about the future, I allowed some of the old hopes and dreams we'd painted together to come back to me, believing one more time that maybe they could really come to be. Once the high emotions had calmed themselves in both of us again, it was never very long though before things would return to ‘normal’ once more. She had the biggest dreams about the person she wanted to become, the kinds of things she knew she had to do to be happy, but she didn’t have enough left after the detours, whatever else was needed for it, to do any of the real work to get there and stay there. . . she seemed only able to take the very first step, spending time with the thought of changes.

Each time we drifted in our lanes, while either of us detoured, I felt the light of love and togetherness dim a little bit more in my own heart. I stopped depending on her to be there for me as a partner in life, and redefined our relationship so that I could be happy enough with what she could offer, when she could offer it. My heart was not strong enough to withstand the detours and absences without attaching to it feelings of rejection, abandonment, loneliness, sadness, anger, and disappointment. I replied with my own passive aggressive reactions of the same, and then punished myself for it. It was better for me, if I wanted to stay together (which I did), that I change what I expected from the relationship, and work with what I knew was there. From that point onward, I lived with my best friend, who I still loved with all my heart, and I didn’t ask any of those “lover,” or “partner” things of her, or myself, any longer. She was my best friend, and I would take that to be enough.

Through that time, I felt my passion, my fire for our relationship, the dreams I had for our future fade – I let them dissolve, I let them go. Instead I lived for the togetherness, the companionship and friendship that our relationship provided, even when our paths diverged. Our drives together were usually so nice, and without the expectations I held before, I started to be happy again in the time we spent together. The meridian was beautifully flowered; butterflies and ladybugs were coming around, things felt pretty good for me, and I found the way to be happy, together.

The point came though, only weeks ago, when I realized that she wasn’t happy, if only because she told me. Friendship, companionship, wasn’t what she came back for. Though she tried to stay on the road with my new definition, her tires were making that flap-flap-flap noise that I recognized, and I finally understood: it wasn’t working, this redefinition, and it wasn’t just me.

Timing coincided that at this point that suddenly my love was to be off on her own adventure for a bit of time, and I had some time to be on my own. I found myself squealing my tires, splashing through puddles and letting the mud drip in gobs messily down my windows before wiping it off, spinning endless donuts in the sandpits with the dust flying up in thick gray clouds around me, before pealing off back into my lane again. I could see now that in the time we had both been trying to make it work, trying to get enough out of what the other was able to share, we had been dampening our own spirits, excitement and energy for life, and hope for the future. I had been expecting less out of life, and of course the universe had been happy to oblige. I felt like I had just driven out of a foggy haze that my eyes had become adjusted to over time, and though my heart held a heavy sadness, I was also elated, free, lighter. That I when I knew — it was time for me to head out on my own road again, to let my friend, my love, rebuild her own road.

I didn’t build up a story around why, as I did before; I didn’t try to reach a new level of understanding about where it went wrong or what was missing, as I did before; I didn’t try to find a ‘clear and concise explanation’ for problem and solution, as I did before; I just finally listened. Listened to the voice that had been whispering to me for awhile, to the knowing our bodies hold when we take the time to hear them - it was time, that path had been laid out in front of us, and I was not going to drive it any longer.

Now to throw a bit of a bigger curve into it... in the time my love was off on her adventure she did some of her own evaluation, and came to many of the same conclusions I had. However, she returned to our drive with renewed vigour for making the changes needed on the path to becoming the beautiful shining person she knew she was, and has thrown herself headlong into weeding and deconstructing the meridian between our lanes, and rebuilding the road we were once driving together toward the future. From where I drift, I see so many shades of the shining, excited, joyful woman I first met, participating in her life from all directions. She seems to really see the areas of her life that have been holding her back, and her desire to make life-altering changes is flaring out from within. Sadness and loneliness, grief and distance still lurk behind her eyes, largely I think because she can feel that I am no longer sharing the road with her, and somewhere, sometimes, she knows that for me it is too late. My best friend wants once again to be my partner, my lover, my wife, but that piece of me is no longer here.

“Where is my wife?” she seems to ask me, and I don’t know how to tell her, “she is already gone”. These reflections, I know, shine back at me to show me what she sees when she looks into me, and I am further aware that I am broken, I’m missing some parts, and it is time for me to put myself back together again, to make some repairs.

That daily choice we talked about when we first came together is in front of me each day, and these days I don’t make it for the same reasons I once did.

Today I stay because I feel badly for wanting something else, for wanting to leave, even though I am already gone.

I stay because I don’t know how to leave, but not because I want to stay.

I stay because I’m scared she will fall back onto those dark paths if I leave, and I wish her light, and happiness, and love... above all, life.

Ultimately, I have set my path, and I guess at this point I have also set hers. I hope, with all of my heart, that the changes she needs to make to feel happy, to love herself and the world again, are ones that she is ready to make. I hope that she is ready to build herself a beautiful road, lined with flowers and trees, with the beautiful and bright access roads that take her on scenic detours with new life-changing adventures whenever the fancy strikes her.

She is smart and funny, kind and courageous, beautiful and strong, devoted and passionate. The gifts she carries out into the world are many, and she hasn’t yet come to recognize that many of them shine within her, waiting to be shared.

Though happiness seems to have been a fair-weather friend in the past, it is obvious they have established a new relationship, and I have joy in my heart when I see it. The road we’ve shared has not been without its share of potholes, pit stops, accidents and flat tires, but it has, without a doubt, been beautiful. My life, my heart, and hers, will be forever altered, our life together a cherished gift that I will forever hold in my heart, without regret.

If only I knew what the next step should be, how to move forward from this place, what to do. Instead, here I sit, here I stay, for the wrong reasons.

Soul mates...

"Your problem is you don't understand what that word means," says Richard from Texas.

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit,
and that’s what everyone wants.

But a true soul mate is a mirror,
the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back,
the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet,
because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.

But to live with a soul mate forever?
Nah. Too painful.

Soul mates,

they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave.
And thank God for it."

(Elizabeth Gilbert: Richard from Texas, Eat, Pray, Love)

Wow, the heartache that could be saved if we grew up thinking this way... Imagine how differently we might approach these wonder-makers when they came into our lives, if we thought this to be their purpose?