I was picking purslane today and reflecting on the break-up I am going through. Pulling at the roots gently to not disturb the soil, I could imagine how I could be a weed to her. To be chosen again and again to be removed, discarded, and my presence excavated from her garden of presence. I could sense how she wants nothing to do with me, though this being purely a guess, in the stench of silence that she has chosen to embody.
Sitting down and looking at the elements around me, I felt grief. This love facing possibilities in collapse. Worlds spoken in promise yet not so destitute and broken in sincerities of silence.
I realize that whole worlds unravel when a relationship ruptures. Especially a relationship that I held near in the depths and widths of my heart. How I look back in sorrow to remember how she once expressed how my presence was of such deep gravity to her that she could say I was a world to her. A world that drew near and was allowed to be known.
How deep this contrast is, looking out a window with drapes askew and midnight sickles of light touching darkness. How deep and drawn out this story of disruption. As I am starting to feel naked in emotion. Intimacy with absence of an emptying of who I once was with her.
Sometimes I wonder if I have been minimized into a name in her mind. As I remember she used to call me many. As I know how names can sometimes obscure reality into obsession. A name allowing one comfort in characterization. And I do not resist that because I know name-callling calls upon a familiarity to shame. Where naming can either bring shame or praise yet simply do not touch how we can be many things at the same time.
Though that is purely a guess based on the fragrance of her silence and the others speaking for her.
Something I was uncomfortable by was also how I noticed in many small moments of how her sensitivity could be easefully withdrawn. That in looking back on the photos of us together, I could now sense a misery in her eyes. A misery that she was hiding. Which I am sad about because I now see how naked it was in expression even indirectly. Because there is a certain churning of the soul when I face another facilitating their own torment.
Because the times I distinctly remember her and her joy were in moments of qualification. Of earning her own love rather than seeing love as a need that was never supposed to leave. Even in moments of challenge where it may seem to leave the lengths of our love would be somehow to motivate us. Or to condition us of where we do not need to be. Because I touching how she was betraying her own body.
As I directly witnessed how her deep challenge was metabolizing the pain of how she isolated herself from her own senses. Her own senses of love and protection following in the comfort of restriction and culture that names our bodies not as our homes but places needing to be improved. To fit some pathology of 'normal' or 'desirable'. Following that notion of the modern body: some parts of ourselves were meant to be cut off. To not receive love. To not know human needs as we format love into rights and righteousness rather than necessity and unboundedness. And format change into blaming flames of causation and components rather needing links of mourning, compassion, and communities of challenge.
Now reflecting on my relationship to her, I first noticed all that she could not love in the message of what she did not express.
Even in the depths of our relationship, I am sad reminiscing now how I did not feel appreciated by her with her actions diverging from the paths of what she expressed. As I now remember that though I was grateful to be with her and felt such exuberant joy in a giving to her that felt like receiving, I now understand her love was replete in boundaries. Not in the boundaries that touched needs of safety, observance, and kinship. But of a boundary that paved over all that could be loved.
As I listened into her silence. And in the few messages she reciprocated with me. I could hear every refusal. Every deferral. And every screen, concealment, and containment.
In these times, I resonate with this quote from Ram Dass:
You have a moral responsibility to leave people alone to suffer the way that they choose. All you can do is create an environment for them where if they don’t want to suffer they can come up for air. But you can’t force another human being not to suffer.