Everyone wants someone, we are all just out there floating amongst the stars looking for that one person we can share ourselves with, who will be gentle with us, who feels safe. And then you find that person, you open yourself up, like a patient on a table, you are just there wide open and vulnerable, completely helpless. There’s a reason that surgeons aren’t in that room alone, because what if something happens, what if they can’t finish the job, the hours are long and tedious, backs ache, feet get tired and yet they carry on into the night. Because in the end, someone has to close. But in the operating room of life, when we are there open on the proverbial table, when we have allowed that one person to see every dark corner of our soul, what do we do when that person isn’t there anymore. Because things happen, people change their minds, people die…and what if you gave them everything? How do you survive that?
I don’t know when I let you be that person, sure there was someone or many someone’s there before you, but I can’t seem to put my finger on the moment that it happened. Perhaps it was there in the hammocks in the park, or on some late night call when time just slipped away from us, an hour then two would go by before we realized what had happened. We had one another by the hand walking through the halls of our lives, giving guided tours of the most intimate parts of us.
That’s the thing about change, it almost always begins with some catalyst, some person, place, thing, idea which sets into motion a series of events which cannot be stopped once started. Maybe that was the reason for the attraction, the intense and immediate bond to develop between us. There was a need in that moment of my life for me to trust you with everything, because there was a change coming, the kind of earth shattering, everything in your life will be measured as either before or after this moment of change. I don’t know that you are even aware, I am confident that you know something happened, but I don’t know if you know what, or why, because even I am still reeling from the intense periods of self discovery. I imagine that it started weeks ago, maybe the moment that we met, the cosmic forces of the universe knew that our paths were to cross, that you were to be the one that would help me through this transition. For years I have been running from it, I have been hiding in the corners of the world looking for a safe place to stave off the inevitable. When we met, and for the first time in as long as I remember, I felt safe sitting still.
I miss you, that much I am certain of…in the kind of way that aches through me like grieving the loss of a loved one, I wish there was a way I could run to you, you could hold me and just there in that moment, in that perpetual now, I could be ok. But you are there, wherever there is, dealing with whatever is right in front of you, and I am here, trying to keep myself from drowning in me. Interesting I should say that.
I have become the place where so many people turn when the world comes crashing down on them, always willing to drop whatever it is for whomever is in crisis, and stay until that is over. Yet here I am, in this house, alone, wondering where all of you are…where are you? Perhaps I invested too much, I gave away little pieces of me until I couldn’t any longer, spreading myself like ashes from the urn across the distant plains only to find that one day I wanted to be whole again and I tried to scoop them up, I tried to place them back into the vessel which once held them so delicately, and yet the rain fought against the work, and all was lost.
-Anonymous