Never good at doing things anyone else’s way particularly, always needing to come around in my own good time, never sure when to speak up and when to let people just read my mind, never certain if snapping at hurt feelings is okay or just kind of inappropriate. I’m not one to care much when people go, more set on the moment than the missing, but I do feel it when things are breaking, when the sunlight is falling behind tree’s calling arms— I can’t feel it when they go, but I always feel it as they are going– and the footsteps you leave behind, trampling poems I’ve written for you in the grainy sand, it’s not something I need you to ask about but I wish you had noticed, had taken a moment to pray for me as I screamed out for desperate salvation. There I go again, I’m thinking, begging people to read my mind and love me and leave me alone all at the same time.
At the root of your hard times, where do you look for answers? I feel that I spend a lot of my alone time talking to myself, thinking in-loud about how the world sees me, what I am seeing in the world, the people in my world, my relationship and connection to the distinct higher being that I associate my formation with, etc. During moments of darkness, those thoughts often are shadowed with hopelessness and deep feelings of inadequacy. Even when I am aware that the darkness is fleeting, I am stuck in that realm. I’ve never been much of a fighter.
The truth is, romance is really important to me— almost more-so than the actual substance of the relationship itself. I am aware of this shortcoming/or whatever you call it. The build up can lead to a lot of heartbreak. From building castles in the sand to slathering mud between cracks of your broken heart, I am trying to be a really great partner so much of the time in a dramatic way, wanting to make those I love feel like they are finally receiving all the magic I know they deserve… and often in the solitude I realize I will always be alone in a very real way until I learn to do those things someday for myself. I’m not like other people in that belief that you have to love yourself before you can love another person- but I believe you can learn to love yourself through learning to love another person. The problem I find is that so much of the time I am busy building great romances for people who don’t want to build them back for me. When you fall asleep in your castle, I am wading alone in the breaks of the waves, crying myself to sleep or something like it.
I am alone in the corner, just listening.
I start a lot of sentences with “the truth is.” It’s obnoxious. I hope my writing someday can stand alone without my prefacing and hiding between uncomfortably constructed sentences— hope someday you can tell I am being honest without me mentioning it. Hope that someday the words are clear enough to sing like hope across something more than blank screens or pages, but into something real, something within the other person, maybe you, if you decide to stick around. Do you know that feeling? But—- the truth is, I hope somebody makes you feel real love. I hope even if it exhausts you both, that whomever you choose to be in an intimate relationship wants to desperately take care of you, love you, build you castles, make you mixed cds, let you cry. The truth is, I loved so hard all my life and kept quiet when it counted so much that I loved people so hard and they didn’t know all of the time and then by the time they figure out what I meant, we were too far away. Unconditional love is not normal, but it’s really important. I know that I have been loved greatly, and intensely. I just don’t know after all if I have ever really felt that.
Shoe Bird. 