Learning to love

Captivated in Acceptance

Driving home from my full day of the amazing people I share my life with today, a song came on the radio that reminded me of you and brought me instantly to tears. I realized in that moment that I had not allowed myself to cry since it all changed.

I can almost hear the strumming of your guitar strings in that living room that is so vivid in my memory, as I sit here envisioning you in your apartment wondering. There is still a tiny part of me that is taken back by the death of that fantasy that lasted so long, the one that imagined us spending days like today together; some how meshing our distant lives together, unrealistically in that space of ‘forever’. There was such a lack of distance between us when we were together, almost a perfect fit of likeness, but that fit disappeared in your absence and there I stood, alone in this as always. We laughed and cried through many changes together, I always wanted to wipe your every tear. I always wanted to quiet your every fear, making you feel safe and showing you how captivating you are in your reflection, from my eyes. You showed me how to play. You showed me how to take myself less seriously. Little by little, I let go, very slowly. You did too, but we arrived at different destinations.

I tried so hard to tell myself that you were gone many times, but you resonated in me, through every pore of my existence, every thought included you; because I wanted so desperately for you to see. I wanted you to have the gifts of sight that I had, the ones that allowed me to see you in perfect light, power and purpose. I believed whole-heartedly in each of your dreams and never doubted your next imaginative thought. I watched as you peeled the layers of pain from your heart and slowly licked your wounds so that you could find bits and pieces of you underneath, begging to play the music that drives you from within. I watched as your fingers bled from the strings that haunted you as they provided reprieve from the heartache and disappointments of the recent past. I watched as those fingers became callused and your soul began to escape, one word at a time from your finally singing mouth. You found a voice within you, in those months we were apart. You found that the voice was less angry and more hurt. You played until you found inspiration to see it as art and not pain. I could only see this because I too, had done it. I had simply gone from painting crooked lines with a wide bush and a shaky hand, to the fine detail of each shadow in your face with free form watercolor. I understood, and I still do.

Your presence still lingers here, yet undefined. I spent countless hours of countless months of these years, defining in ink how I felt about you. I had a love affair with my pen that discovered you in my heart on so many different levels. I am at a loss today, wondering who you are and where you went, how to define you now. The most I can surmise tonight, after seeing your 3 am call and passing yet another holiday without you, is that I’ve been alone all along.

This mystery of who you really are and the ‘you’ I kept painted in my mind still eludes me. I am moving on, I have taken the lessons that you gave me, when you consumed my heart and my breath was exhaled for so long hoping that some day it would ricochet from your closeness in my life. I have learned to love and have become willing.

For so long, I held you tight in the light I had created in my own vision of the person I saw, inside of you. Time cannot erase what you have done to my heart. And time will reveal what you have done to my soul. For that, I am truly sorry that I could not wait. To wait and wonder what was real and what was created in this beautiful landscape in my mind would be death of me, piece by piece. I fear that my pushing you away will only make you more hardened and that you will suppress what an amazing person you are, even farther from the person that you are intended to be with someday. I miss you. I miss the dream of you. I miss what I thought I was waiting for. I am sorry that I painted this all in my head and that the reality of losing you to the life you cannot leave behind has potentially hurt or confused you. I have been given the chance to see and feel some of those dreams in real life, only by letting you go, once again. I have no idea if I will ever feel the way I felt about you, again. I only hope I didn’t hurt you more by sharing those feelings along the way and not having the staying power to fantasize any longer. You had every fiber of me, and I know that I had every available fiber of you, for the time we were given. Letting go of you, or the dream of you has been the hardest thing I have ever let go of in my life. Having it at all has been the most rewarding. I guess after the months of letting it die piece by piece, I am finally allowing myself to cry about it. Acceptance is the key, they say, the opposite of struggle. I am at a loss for the painting of you in my creative heart, on the canvas that is now blank.

Paint Darling. Paint your story and let my heart see that it was not all in vein. Become who I know you are and everything I know you want to be. Make me feel better by letting me see you in the happiness I have found. Find a way out and dig to the top of the endless prosperity that awaits your heart’s desires and show me that you will live the life I have seen welling inside you for years. Find you, learn to love you as I do and then learn to share him with someone who will be captivated as I was. You are an amazing gift.