“Why would you ask that?”

“I guess maybe because you don’t seem happy. I was just wondering. You know,  if you don’t talk to ____ [You] anymore, tell him I sure as hell want to talk to him.”

“Mom! You can’t say that to me! Don’t even joke.”

“Well, if he’s anything like you say he is…” She chuckled.

I’m glad she knows how I feel about you. It gives me freedom to be honest about how much I miss us. But her joking makes me feel like I belong on an episode of Jerry Springer.

Your name was spoken aloud today. For today I get to feel close to you.

“Compared to when?” I asked.

“I don’t know…before.”

I’m so talented in the area of hiding my feelings and acting ”as if”.
I was shocked to discover that I’d been wearing pain and loneliness on my sleeve for the world to see. I’m torn between wanting to shout at anyone who will listen or protecting the painful treasure in my heart.

S calls what is happening “texture”. She claims I have texture to my life because I left my heart with You. I’m like the surface of an oil painting. Divots and welts on my soul.

I call what is happening to my soul “starvation”. Straved for knowledge, direction, connection, intimacy… with you.

Fear used to run my life. Now it’s regret.

Perhaps no one has a happy childhood. Childhood is when you’re small, weak, and impotent; everyone else makes decisions for you, and you rarely get your way. Everything hurts more than it should, because the armor of experience you’re developing is still more chinks than plates: you have to burn your hand a few times before you learn to avoid the fire. Childhood, for most, is punctuated with frightening painful disappointments designed to teach you how not to be afraid. And for others, it’s just one constant frightening painful disappointment.

When the experience of my childhood ended, I desperately wanted to get as far away from it as possible. Desperately wanting to get away did not mean going somewhere . It meant getting away – running hell bent for leather away from what was.

Making this decision and that decision, learning as I went. Lots of wrong ones that led, eventually, to a lot more right ones. Not knowing every choice I made, especially the wrong ones, would always remain with me. Silent. Or not.

It was years before I learned that I would never outrun myself – and that was exactly what I’d kept trying to run from. That early list of failures and miscalculations that had seemed to plague my life was something I could never escape, no matter how hard I tried.

I’m all grown up now. I know about my flaws, my weaknesses. Staying emotionally and mentally afloat is no longer a battle that leaves me exhausted. I long ago accepted that Reality is going to shift beneath my feet on a constant basis, but it’s nothing more than the universe making little adjustments to keep things in line. And sometimes those shifts mean being left abandoned and alone, losing everything, starting over with the old fears.

But Fear’s good because it can help to keep you alive. What kills people is paralysis. No ability to make choices, no ability to move forward. There’s no such thing as a person without fear because you know what would happen? Live fast, die young, don’t stay swimming in the gene pool . Real courage isn’t about charging into the teeth of a problem with guns blazing. It’s about being scared to death and getting the job done anyway.

So when I want to run away again, to go anywhere, I force myself to remember. Everywhere I go, I will just keep running into myself. There’s here, there’s now, there’s this reality, and everything else, promised or not, is only a dream.

Or a nightmare.

And sometimes you have to accept the nightmare, and the fear, and keep going anyway.

Applied to lovers, this mathematical concept is actually quite romantic. We affect each other. Even when we try to be unaffected. Even when we don’t mean to, even when we don’t want to. We’re connected. I have seen enhanced photos of entangled photons. They share each other’s essence. They are two individual photons connected as one. They are individual entities that share the same materials and come from one photon.
In 1935 Schrödinger proved that if something disturbs the state of one photon, the other feels the effects as well, even when they are not physically connected. He wrote that the second photon could be affected in a predictable way, depending on the first photon’s actions. This fee just exactly like that.

Friends, relatives, and lovers near and far have their own lives, their own significant responsibilities. The need to concentrate on their own family matters, money matters, work matters, husbands, brothers, wives, and children is significantly more important than participation in your little pity party.

You are a big girl. Stop being a crybaby and a wuss. Grow up and act like a responsible adult.

Yesterday I was forced to run some errands, stopping by one of those quick to eat places. I grabbed my heartattack-in-a-paper-bag order and left the premises through a glass door clearly marked, in really big letters: PUSH . And as I pushed through, I noticed a very small sign, just at chest level:

You can have it your way and pull if you want,
but this door can be pretty stubborn.”

And for the first time in three weeks I lifted my head, squared my shoulders, smiled, and thought

“So can I “

I don’t always know what to say.

If a laugh a little, smile a little, move the conversation toward a lighter subject I may sound inconsiderate and thoughtless.

If I express words of comfort, they may sound like insincere platitudes from someone whose life goes on.

If I feel overwhelming joy at the minutes we come together via an IM program, so there is overwhelming guilt that the time may have been stolen from somewhere it is needed more.

No matter how sincere, at times like this any words of solace echo in a hollow cave.

I want to hold his heart in the palm of my hands and bathe it in my warm breath. I want to convey love and understanding and acceptance as soundless whispers while he dreams. I want to join my voice to his and scream our anger out and up and over the landscape until it is spent in the far reaches of the universe.

And in place of all those things I cannot do, I do the one I can. Love, silently, without question.

Today, so unlike that which I dreamed about, I refuse to get dressed, refuse to eat, refuse to get out of bed and care for all who depend on me. Fuck them. Fuck them all. This was my day, Our day and I’m celebrating it with tears on my god damned pillow case.

I’ve never, ever felt so sorry for myself and it is not a pretty thing to behold.

Last night as I lay trying to sleep, I reached out to find you. The connection was tenuous, almost non-existent. I don’t know why it is sometimes that way – and other times glows with a warm golden light that takes me right to you – wherever and whenever you are. I do know that when the light dims it leaves me unsettled and fretful. Feeling less safe because the path seems lost and distant.

I couldn’t help but wonder, was I keeping you awake, or were you keeping me awake. Which of our jumbled, troubled minds was edging it’s way into the other.

I suppose it was both, wasn’t it.

But somehow, as always, you know when to connect with me and talk about just the right things. To give me just the extra amount of time I long for. To reinforce and rebuild that bright golden strand between us. The love you placed there for safekeeping so long ago will always lead me back to you.

I know I’ve said it before, and sometimes wonder if you get tired of hearing it. Or if it means less having been repeated so often. But I’ll say it again anyway – I love you.

No income. No insurance. No treatment for anything. Ever. Because I’m uninsurable now unless I move directly from one plan to another. And the cost of the treatment without insurance is $10,000 per month. And it makes you pretty sick for a while. And going to another full-time job (assuming I could even find one) means I couldn’t afford to be sick even a single day. And there are the other things. The migraines. The regular old aging stuff. The mammograms… you know….the STUFF you can’t afford without insurance.

I guess I knew it all along. I think it’s one of the reasons I am so awfully sad all the time right now. I’m really stuck here. There’s just nothing to smile about anymore.

Oh, I realize I chose to be stuck all these years. I rationalized that while it isn’t a relationship, the rest wasn’t that horrible and maybe life would never offer me anything any better. Especially after You.

But between you and me? When things were especially bad, I would still creep to the window like a small child and wish upon a star that some day my fairy Godmother would stop by, wave her wand, and “Poof” everything would magically change.

You gotta be awful careful when you wish for something that hard. Sometimes you get exactly what you ask for.