If I ever said I loved you, I meant it. I am not built to lie. There is a hollowness that echoes within when I do. And the cold winds that blow through the empty corridors the lies make in my heart whistle and shriek. I told many lies out of anger and let me say that I am sorry.
I know apologies may not be enough and there are words that can cut to the bone, for my mind is sharp, filed on years of hardship and clever maneuvering, trying to carve a life out for myself that never had a precedent, making up for my lackluster education by slaying volumes of the history of everything, trying to make up for what I never got to have. I am prone to acting tougher than I am and there is a kind of posturing that comes with that, a front that I put up because early on I needed it. There were obstacles that required my bullying and big balls and I forget to put them away when it comes to living like a human being. Growing up in a war zone does not excuse my behavior, but sometimes I am vulnerable to post traumatic stress syndrome. Coming ‘home,’ or to a place that we have made our home, the people we have chosen as family, is not easy as we think. I throw punches in the night to invisible foes and inadvertently hit the one I love most. We grow, we get better, but sometimes that isn’t good enough. But let me just say that I am filled with remorse, that certainly my words may be irretrievable and I cannot even dare ask for forgiveness, but that understanding might be possible, and after that, compassion might follow. I cannot control how you will feel when you see this, all I can do is say there is enough hatred in the world and I wish not to add to it. Let me love instead.
There is the shadow side of love, the darkness that comes from the pain of love distorted, love unfulfilled, love unreturned, love unrequited, love unexpected, love unpredictable. I was expressing that when I was writing here so angrily, unflinchingly using my gift for putting words together for a dishonorable purpose. What was written was not directed at one person, nor was it directed at a situation, but merely the reality that love sometimes does not bend to your will, which is why there can be such misery in the world. My inability to accept that love won’t do what I am demanding from it, that love will not come when called, that love will leave me waiting all night only to wake up fully dressed for the party that I was never invited to, lying on a completely made bed, the morning light coming through the windows, hand still on the phone hours unrung beside – keeps my anger in a cage inside me, the doors rusty and locks half broken.
I am stuck in an unguarded moment and the creature escapes faster than I can catch it, outrunning my reason, my mind, my heart, the untamed, enraged animal yearning for what it cannot have, killing everything in its way. I caught the creature, forced it back into the cell it belongs in. I’ll try not to let it out again and this time, I have employed locks and stocks and barrels to keep it at bay. I sang it the song of searing heartbreak, of long ago love revisited, lovingly treasured memories of kisses, the unedited remembrance of the miracle of love, the gentle moments that we all have in our history, if we only thought to reconstruct the past as it was when it began, not how it ended, those once upon a times, the beginnings that we wanted to be a whole story, where we’d live happily ever after, and leaving out the bitter reality that we didn’t. I sung and sung a lullaby for the angry animal, and finally, after many hours of coaxing and cooing, it is sleeping peaceful and dreaming of love that it may have someday, twitching its paws, with night visions of running free through fields of flowers and wild strawberries.
It may burst from its captivity again, but for now, that dark beast sleeps and dreams of glory, because it knows that I love it, even though it scares me, it is destructive, it is mad, bad and dangerous to know, I know it is part of me. Because as hard as I hate, as big as my hate, as ugly as my hate, as mean as my hate, my love is much stronger than my hate. My love embraces my hate in its overwhelming warmth and honeyed light, and my hate can do nothing but lick the sweetness of it.
Watching the moon, the shadow of the earth moving across it, I once sat with a lover, and marveled at the nature of all things, that we, along with lunar eclipses and all other uncontrollable yet watchable events, occur whether we would like them to or not. From the balcony of the future, seeing myself younger and probably wiser, I remember thinking that no matter how much I loved this man, the shadow of the earth would move across the moon, and just as sure as I was about the momentary eclipse, I would never be able to make him love me. I accepted that as truth, and the way of the world. Nature is, and will always be. When I accept that I am merely part of nature, the world is perfect, and so am I. Sometimes I forget nature. Forgive me and forgive nature, for those lapses of judgment, irresponsibility, rebellion, rage, that is part of nature too.
I’ve been reading and re-reading this post for years. It helps me tremendously. Today the monster escaped from it’s cage, and I looked for it for comfort. It still holds water. Every time I read it, I am able to breathe again. Thank you so much for writing it and sharing it with the world.