red
Not surprisingly, I'm here because I can't sleep. And not surprisingly, it's because I'm thinking about you. I think these last few nights you've been keeping me up. In fact, I think it started last last week.
The other night, I was thinking about how good needs evil so that it can be defined as the opposite of evil. How, in a way, everything is not just what it is, but also a negation of what it's not. It stands in contrast to everything else.
Ache, emptiness, loneliness, or that sense of a bleak, cold, flat, horizon-stretching void -- peeking it's gaping, arching face into our lives in the ways that it does -- is also one step closer to warm, safe contentment. And I've made peace with that in more ways than I thought I would ever need to. And then in more ways than I thought I could. As I like to think: I have become more tough and in more ways than I ever wanted to.
But I worry about scarring. Between a rock and a hard place is crystallizing me, but I wonder what will come out the other end. I'm managing better than I thought I would. I'm landing on two feet, and taking time to connect with the earth below them as I navigate the next things in my life. I think I can make this work.
Yet I'm here, after a long week, unable to sleep. Because the absence of you can't bring your company. Or bring me any closer to more fully understanding my feelings our conquering my doubts about you. There is simply: I wish you were here. And all of my reasoning about how things inform the things which they aren't -- it falls apart. The insistent -- it's like before, when I was concerned I would fall apart if I had to commit to a job I am not passionate about. But I've been able to swallow that bitter pill and move forward. Move forward at all costs.
Maybe this is more insistent. Whether it's mostly what you are or mostly what I lull myself into connecting with, it pulls more urgently. I wonder if I need time, though it has been two years. And there were times when I was stepping fully into the unknown. With little bearing or foundation on what my feelings would do to me, I simply moved forward. And I was lucky. We could have gone separate ways so much sooner.
Even with the extra time with you that I was given, and as much I have grown in all the corners of my life, I can't suppress this enough.
I was thinking about why I go into all this in my journal. It's a bit useless, since I have tried to step back and not go into too much detail about my life. You are "you" or "the her." I can't describe you. In fact, I once wrote a poem about you. It wasn't very good. Didn't come out quite right. Not enough color -- because it was based on the impression of white, black and gray that you had left that day. And that's my problem: I can't write you away. So many times when I think about you -- often because some everyday thing: brushing my teeth or hearing a song, reminds me of you -- that gaping wave approaches and then hits me. And when it's bad, it's not: She isn't here now, but she isn't that far, and you may finally converge some day; no, it's: She isn't here...and then the things about her that also aren't here.
My ache doesn't hurt like it used to. Perhaps I'm toughening, or it's going deeper, to places I've had to short-circuit in my strengthening.
Or I think of you and then red, and how you like red. And then a billowing, wispy, silky redness.
And that and this helps, though that makes my pulse race, and this method feels like a rag being racked through my hands just for that last, small, stale wine-red drop of relief.