Jun
27
What Has Washed Over Me
June 27, 2005 | |
The heart whispers…so listen carefully.
When we met I was lost.
I was happy and carefree.
I was wasted half the time.
When we parted I was found, and discovered myself through the shadows of my own inner darkness.
When we reconciled there was still much left concealed,
so we came together again,
but differently than before.
Speaking more eloquently this time–
whispering from the heart in delicate trepidation.
And at last I will answer you…
This one is for you, my ghost.
The silence of months that followed afforded no closure
but left a heart more embittered. Which ultimately lead to my usual:
A forced severing of hopes…As I rationalized; It was easier to bury the dead
than allow your ghost to haunt my bedroom. Inevitably the human need to reconcile surfaced, and it was you who instigated the reopening of a chapter I forcibly cut short and left the reader hanging.
Initially, I was offended.
Just as the impression of your lips on mine began to fade, I find your message taunting my inbox. So unwelcome was this, that a phantom insentience laid heavily upon my heart in that forbidden place where you used to live.
And resurrected indeed a character you were,
that had since been erased from my story.
Men do not reappear in my life by my invitation.
That would mean forsaking my pride which is a monster far greater
than my own demon need to be loved.
To transcend my own despondency and place my ear upon my lover’s heart
seemed inconceivable.
Otherwise, there would be many more happy endings to these chapters.
And maybe my autobiography would read like a novel and not just a series of short vignettes. But I am working on it.
And I thank you for your boldness now-
As always you have stirred parts of my being that lay dormant,
but beg to be revealed.
That parting gift you left with me:
A delicate compendium of Letters to a Young Poet has spoken to me.
Remember? That unassuming, yet perfect little gem you suggested—
How curious that I would find such truth in these pages.
Today it is Sunday, a day to exhale.
And on this day marked appropriately for introspection,
I brought your gift to the beach with me. And I let the words wash over me,
as directed, like a baptism.
"Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now."
"Let it wash over you…."
"…love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
More fluid with a pen than my own tangled heart,
one that often confuses love for the need to be loved–
I prematurely composed our last rites.
And although convinced you were indeed not in love with me,
I was too uncertain in my own skin to invite the opportunity.
"A self fulfilling prophecy…"
I was virtuoso at my own disenchantment; a dedicated self-saboteur.
"Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?)"
I was never good with a listlessness heart.
Or shall I say, one that could not dote upon me with the heady enthrallment I required (yet couldn’t bear to verbalize).
How then, is one to ever pry open this oyster shell, and discover a pearl,
when the gem is so securely padlocked?
"…young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing they
(who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are,
in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment…And what can happen then?
What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other…”
The purity you bring out in me is frightening.
As now I am forced to reconcile with the core of my existence—
And the ebb and flow deemed my life for the past 7 years
is no longer a natural process moving forward and back without purpose.
What you have pulled from me is my fate.
Boldly stripping through layer upon layer displaying a prominent X upon me.
A treasure that begged to be discovered, and the irony was…
I had the key in my hand all along.
"Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; But take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self…"
Indeed what was concealed and clamped tight behind lock and key
was exactly the culprit that had been killing me:
The potential to be great and the subsequent cowardice
to squander that very greatness.
Life waits for no one.
"…the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it happens (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being."
The shift inside me has moved with the speed of a glacier.
And although the years have disguised its threat, truth and bone will reshape my fate regardless of my desire to rectify the renovation.
Life has this funny way of contorting us into positions never thought possible… It’s a quiet pain. And change hurts.
But the human animal possess an extraordinary talent to chameleonize.
And what happens in between is simple:
Time. Patience. And ultimately the discovery of one’s fate:
To become not a person we think we must become,
but to become the person who we know that we are.
"…fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them."
I thank you, dear poet, for sharing these perfect words that so poignantly illustrate the crutch of my plight.
You know me well, better than I thought I knew myself. And for this reason alone, there will always be a place in my heart where you will live.
And the ghost that haunts my bedroom is a presence from which I will no longer hide but, instead allow it to wash over me.
Fate is the story a heart speaks with great intention,
And it whispers, so listen carefully.
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