In the morning I wipe the sleep from my eyes, thanking my brain for not dreaming of her. And it feels good and right that I have habits that are mine and only mine and don’t come from our time together.
Even so she’s still there, when I look at my hair growing in from the scalp I shaved when we were together. I cut my locks and spirit off, the trees didn’t reach for me anymore, the wind didn’t know my name. I’m only now realizing how much it hobbled me. How much I hobbled myself, wrapping up into a pretty little compliant package to fit the person she thought I was. What she wanted me to be.
She’d get angry with me because I didn’t want to spend every waking moment with the love of my life. She couldn’t understand that I will always be this person, always craving solitude. She thought I didn’t love her enough when every day even now she’s in my thoughts and everywhere I look.
I just moved to a house she never touched me in. Under a roof she’s never walked beneath. With trees we never passed and wild places that don’t recognize me.
Yet. We are getting to know one another.
After a year and a half sobbing daily for her I feel cut off from the emotions, the ones that stole my breath, sheared my feet off with spirit, encased me, desolate. I get angry that I don’t cry for her anymore. But as I write this the itching of tears inevitable begins, and I wipe my eyes clear of wet, blaming it on allergies.
It’s good to know I do still feel. Living in a house that hasn’t seen my heart shatter, though only a week now. I’d wondered if I could feel so deeply still. And it felt painful not touching the exquisite beauty of despair. I felt heartless.
Gray matter knows this numbness is a protection…but my passionate heart has been sad without that ache she handed me. I keep it safe, tucked away. But I never look at it anymore. It doesn’t deserve the sun.
And I know she thinks I’ve moved on and am screwing numerous people and partying and being the whore she called me.
I’ve moved on. But not in the way she would have chosen. She can’t justify her insecurity and jealousy by pointing at me and saying, “SEE?! I TOLD you!!”
It feels as my hair grows out that she does too…I don’t have a strand on my head she’s touched, even if my arms still feel her hands shoving me. My skin carries the memory of her, and so I walk in the mornings and sweat her out of my pores.
In walking the grasses sweep around me, growing sacred and deeper than our eyes can see, rooting beneath my skin until I can feel their tendrils brush my spine.
In the rain pours to replace her, as I look up under clouds. They cradle the water a school of salmon swam through a millennia ago. I hear their tails flick the surface of the rivers they traveled, and the waters laugh at them.
As raindrops strike my sins from me my eyes fill with branches, reaching, grabbing greedily to pluck mosquitoes from the air. I look up and the trees are a lodge I can rest in, sweeping their arms to knock me to my knees.
I rub soil into my fingertips, to erase her touch, and feel her buzz beneath the soles of my feet, so I scrape my toes through the waving creeks to wash them free, but I can’t because the love I had for her is a part of me.
And finally I can accept that, but I still feel heartless sometimes. Slowly I’m learning that I never was. Just as I was never anything close to what she called me.
I’m finding the hole she left in me never really was there, because I’d always filled it myself. I just made room for her as well inside me. And it’s freedom to only be me in here. There’s no room for anyone, and I love the little refuge I’ve created inside, where the wild things roam. It’s the way it should have always been, and I’ve known it since I was young.
Some of us are meant to be filled with others.
Some of us feel crowded alone.
A Burd in Flight 
One of the biggest things that strikes me about all this… I mean, I’m really happy you’re at your new place, it seems like a really lovely neighborhood and a healthy setup, not to mention a fresh start on a while lot of stuff… But what stuck with me is how often people who feel EVERYTHING so intensely and for so long can be accused of being heartless, of feeling nothing at all. Happened to me all the time growing up, and it’s more closely a thing of reacting in a way not expected… Because who the fuck can really look at you and know how you feel anyway? So we don’t show the right kinds of hurt, the worries were expected to have, and for some reason it occurs to no one that there’s just maybe an extra dimension to it that no one is seeing at all. You can grieve for what was familiar to you even if you don’t want it back, maybe people can understand that. But if what bothers you so deeply and frequently, if nobody is looking beyond the expected, then they miss the actual loss your suffering entirely, and that likely means they didn’t see any of the positive either… Not really. And feeling disconnected from other people is entirely different than calling into question whether you’re feeling enough, or the “right” thing. It sounds like you’re taking up more space just for you, but that stuff comes at a price that isn’t offset by pleasing someone else, or by the hope of winning against an old problem, an old script. It’s all long game, big picture strategy and it’s fucking hard to keep feeding yourself and doing stuff everyday when it would be nicer to just smother whatever damn thing bothers you full time until it will never come back, but all that damage lingers, and stubbornly refuses to respond to anything but incremental, consistent change lol. It’s good you’re writing it out and getting a sense of where you stand in the present, because it’s really so strange when these shifts in perspective hit you. They’ve already been there for a while, but changing an external thing can bring that into the open. All the things you’re doing for yourself are so good, but integrating all of what brought you to who you are right this second fucking sucks sometimes, and being someplace fully new can unexpectedly be as painful as finding yourself somewhere saturated with memory, but you’re still *you* wherever you are, and occasionally intrusive thoughts can take you where you need to go… But you are free to leave again too ❤️
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