“It is a mourning, to be broken for one we love. And it doesn’t heal easily or quickly. I’m over three years now from walking away from who I thought was the love of my life and still not the same. It is unfair how we punish ourselves.”
I wrote this today to my longest love, my first heartbreak. The one who knew me the best, and I him. Who ruins himself with guilt for someone he couldn’t save.
We wrack ourselves so when we open to love. Hang our hearts from a red string hoping when it breaks we fall into one another in a way that doesn’t cut like a bed of straight razors.
And we do it until our souls can’t take it anymore and we have to choose to live, to walk away, to survive, because we are worth it.
But, oh the guilt. From walking away. Choosing our Self, or our child, or our shortened breaths for once for good for something other than the abuse that snuck in like a whisper of campfire in the spring, when I didn’t believe my senses because it couldn’t be true.
The one who we handed our shattered crumbs of a hope to in the dish of our heart and trusted them to hold it safe.
The one who held us in ways that could never bleed us until they said those cruel words, spitting them in my face, until my tears mixed with her saliva and I could see a loathing in her eyes, smell regret in her breath.
And it isn’t fair. How choosing our Self breaks us too. So we are punished a dozen times over each day we open eyes without her. How we miss the peaks and ridges of our roller coaster torment ride because it felt, it FELT so essential as the rings of the earth, the bedrock that always was. And now it’s gone and contentment should be enough but it never is. Because it’s not FEELing like I did with her in our wild places.
So we punish our Self for losing her once to her anger, we couldn’t save her from it though we tried, for years. And we punish our Self for walking away. Every day a ritual of grief, each season one of mourning.
A Burd in Flight 