Missed Beats

I have, in the last several months, questioned almost everything: life, my own identity, my purpose, my worth, everyone else, love, trust...and God. Somewhere along the path of broken, sharp shattered glass on which I've had to trod on barefooted, I came to a really weird realization that maybe somewhere I lost a belief in this big G entity. I still have strong feelings about the physics of the cosmos though, as in a greater force, maybe big F.  This F is found in smaller, (arguably) less overpowering things, like music. Like, laughter. Or even tears. In that really really really great feeling that comes out of really really really great and insane friendships. And even those really really really horrible feelings that come out of them, when things are out of sync, and even in love. Like music, sometimes we just have to wait and find the rhythm again.

Filament

When you're hanging onto the last filament of that jagged rope's end, and with each passing second, it slips that little much more, and you call for help, and the one on the edge just looks at you and doesn't give you the hand you thought they would give you, that's probably the moment when it's worth letting go, and falling.

Oh, Scrooge

"You fear the world too much," she answered, gently. "All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?"

"What then?" he retorted. "Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you."

She shook her head.

"Am I?"

"Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made, you were another man."

"I was a boy," he said impatiently.

"Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are," she returned. "I am. That which promised happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that we are two. How often and keenly I have thought of this, I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it, and can release you."

"Have I ever sought release?"

"In words. No. Never."

"In what, then?"

"In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end.  In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight."

— A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

Starved

Isn't love a bit like parenting? Especially a love like ours; a relationship that came into the world without really knowing of its own existence. That could not tell, not in words for the longest time, what exactly was its place and function—it simply was. And it was in that newborn joy of exploration and discovery that it shone ever more. The way it was nurtured, the many falls and skinned shins, the many tears, the yearning for something that wasn't explicable in any language, and the quick appeasement in putting our heads down, holding each other, in peace, together.

These days, I wonder about you. Every little thing makes me pause. I've cooked this meal; maybe he would like it. Maybe he would remember, for example, the way he learnt to cook alongside me. The encouragement and sidelong support that went both ways, not only one. I'm not sure if it is too late to say this now.

But there were things that were thought impossible, but I believed and then so did he. Maybe, like his greatest relished dish, this belief would also come to be. I don't know how to mourn this loss—is there even a proper way?

I have no appetite these days. Yet I am almost perpetually hungry. But I can't eat. I pause at each morsel, wondering what you're eating, if you're eating, what you're cooking, if you are. Instead, I reward myself with something more than my usual ration on the rare days I hear your voice. It's not what you want to hear. It's not what you want to know. But this is how it is, and I can't help it—maybe not more than you can.

But even as it's a child, love, it too is a parent. This love held me up when I wasn't too steady on my feet. It drove me to places that I didn't think I had the effort to go. It stood on the sidelines and cheered me on, motivating me to keep running even when I was hurting so much inside.

The way I am hurting now—angrily, anguished, forlorn, hopeful. And starved.

Wingspan

Yesterday I finally looked at the sky, and realized there was a moon up there. As obvious as it may sound, the fact that I had to notice at all told me a lot about myself; mostly that I have forgotten to recognize the things that have always mattered to me when I was most alone.

The very long treks I have made this winter had been accompanied with a deeply internalized grief, so internalized that I failed to look outward, at my immediate surroundings. The cold, the uniform white and gray which melded so seamlessly with the uniform gray sky surrounded me like a cocoon. I was suffocating and choking, and my breathe froze almost before it had even left me. Sometimes I was frozen dry, brittle and ready to shatter, and sometimes I discovered rivulets of tears joining the falling fat snowflakes that fell, the way I had fallen.

Nevertheless, the moon had remained aloft, the way it had always been, and the way it always will be, high above, it, too, was alone. Maybe it took the rays of a setting sun, or the blowing gales of snow from roofs, or even the glint of shards of moon to adorn a cloudy, starless sky, but I remembered.

Even from the cocoon, the butterfly eventually emerges.

Unanchored

Imagine what it must have felt like to be on that ship, on tumultuous, fathomless waters, for days--months--on end, without ever really knowing what lay beyond the next wave.  What sort of courage, and what sort of awe, did it take to be able to experience and live that way?

I was born here, and have probably spent more than 90% of my life on these lands. The "Great White North"-- or the "New World" as it was then referred to in the times I now refer to. And even though I have easy access, relatively, to all the greatness and beauty that is right here, stretching from ocean to ocean, I have yet to experience it myself.

Instead, I daydream about other lands. About hopping on a plane, no less, to get there. There is hardly any treachery to be risked, no more precocious, shaky, hand-built ships to board and voyage upon. Instead, ironically, all that treachery is no longer on realms out of grasp. It's all now deeply entrenched within me.

And when I think what it took to be, in those days, stuck in a place--even if it was a vehicle--that you could not really escape from, lest chance your entire life, even as you were doing while remaining where you were, imagine the wonder of distant lands, and never really knowing what they were, and how far they stretched. That was a heroism that couldn't ever be replicated.

For, today we have all this technology that gives us a huge summation of all the information we have striven for, since then, to know. A Google search is now our voyage on oceans. The limits of the 'unknown' have been stretched and exploited. And we are still not satisfied.

It's hardly any wonder we cast our eyes to the sky. We look to both inanimate and animate, and seek for meaning. Inspiration even.

All I want to do now, though, is turn my ship around, and retrace those waves that will never again exist. To pull back the stones I have cast into a million ripples, to retrace the steps that have turned my whole ship into the sea of chaos and retie the two severed ends of rope that has lost me my anchor.

Sane

All that is holding me up right now is faith. Not the religious faith, not really, it's not about praying for that one specific thing (or person) or waiting for a recompensation of good karma to make it happen, though it almost could be perceived this, latter, way. All I have right now is faith, because if I let that go, I drop, fast, heavily and without any sort of gentleness that is often accompanied with the other kind of falling. This is its mirror image, in all the darkest, painful, haunted ways.

Oh, I am functioning. I am still able to get up and go through the motions. I am still able to perform and fulfill the template that forms whoever I am supposed to me: I crack jokes, I comfort and help, I execute, I even excel. But I don't really feel as if I am functioning. I am lost.

How do you learn to live without the part of you that makes you really you? I am definitely all about being yourself for yourself, but at the same time, I am most accurately defined by my capacity to love and, by some deeply ingrained need, to be loved.  When you've grown up in an environment that is starkly bereft of this, and more actively engaged in stripping you down at any instance so that you have no real sense of self or worth, it is even more deeply entrenched.

So what do you do when the one person who has stood you through all this decides to switch camps; suddenly you are given the message by this person, too, that you are not worth it.

When I most feared to trust anyone, including myself, and when I finally, finally, learnt to completely and utterly trust, it shatters. The worst part is that for me to heal, I need to destroy that tiny, very last bit of trust I had in myself.

But I can't.

"Hmph"

His love was a quiet one. He did not say much; that wasn't his way. He sniffed and sighed, muttered and huffed. He whispered and drawled. But somehow, it was enough.

I never knew what this ambiguous, arbitrary capacity for enough was. Not until the measure I had dwindled to nothing and then, relatively, that little enough became it all.

His love was a quiet one, and it was not about words. Though it was silent for the most part, once you had it you could not doubt it was there.

Until it was gone.