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the absence of you
is the only answer
to who you are
to me
now
There is something so sinister of a truth colluded in falsity. Hearing the sincerity of their promise to face its collapse into brokenness. As I receive their sincere rejection spoken in action. This abrupt yet banal choice of emptying promises into vacancy.
I feel isolated in the silence they chose. Though, I also connected to how the one who broke me may not be available to heal me. As I reflect on the relationship, I am in sorrow for how I recongize that I was only merely loved. For her, love was a convenience. A convenience that is conditional on how comfortable she was in her own body.
Because from the beginning, maybe I mistook her confession to me as love. As I remember how they spoke to how they felt love in being desired obviating their need to fully love themself. The confession really speaking to how they were surprised by my presence.
In the vacancy of them now, I am so disconnected to her living presence, enough so that I can see the shape their shadow of where they once were. I flutter into the depth of the absence of them in the silence that they chose.
Since I realize the shape of her silence did not emerge only when they most fiercely chose it. It came when I longed for compassion and recevied isolation. It came when I realized they only chose me when it was most convenient to them. Her silence shrouded me when I realized there was a shame behind how she expressed love to me.
Something I so sincerely realize now is how so much of my hurt, of my contraction to life and all its rapture, came from expecting other people to love me in ways unfamiliar to them. To love openly and unabashedly. To love as if the atmosphere were this embrace where all environments were simply waiting for us to be fully present. To be revered in how all places can nourish us only for those to be fully in touch to their starvation.
The shape of their absence was not so clear until I was reminded of you. And I am reminded of you now. I was reminded of a promise: that we could be friends, that you valued my communication, and that you would be available to listen to me.
What friend would consistently be insensitive to me to the point that I could start to anticipate a chilling, bitter coldness from them? What friend would be this ballast of weight, as I carry deep love for you only for it not to be recognized.
This place of weight where I see how my openness to them, to allow them to choose otherwise, only led me to speak with anyone but you. I was the cat killed nine times with ten deaths. As I realize this funeral of sorrow was not just for me. But for a processions of you and the us that are passing away. Passing away in ghouls of grief.
What I realize in someone splitting from me is how deep it hurts to not only lose someone I love but to also lose their favor of love so consistently. To consistently face the absence of their love that I become intimate with the geometry of their reciprocation now fully gone. Darkness encrusted and calcified when my heartarches in the consistency of where I once found their presence.
Someone once wrote about how the first moments are never where it begins. And how dearly do I connect to that when I recongize that I was not the first one to meet the absence: it was them. It was the moments where love was compromised from histories of hurt and wounds never quite being addressed. In the eyes that were expecting to be seen by villages and communities of vulnerability but were only met with one, two or even none when we shared what was most deeply alive inside.
It was the moments where conflict was not met with compassion and suffering with but in reponsibility where fixing was favored over presence. A fixing that eventually emerged into a displacing any space for the darkened parts of ourselves so wanting befriending.
As I find, in the absence of you, the shape that I have been once before. A stranger to myself that could mistake the love as leaving rather than staying, sitting, and being in the silence that revealed the tears of who I once was.
Recognizing the absence of the ordinary in this moment of time where the world asks of us to see her wounded body in reverence, I have the clarity to say that what I am most challenged by is to hold compassion to those hurting. To invite myself to be fully with them, touching a pain they may not even be aware of and to orient towards that.
Since I realize: there is no space ready made for healing in a system that rewards suffocation. Because creation is emergent. Emergent only when we die unto ourselves, unveiling the hill of skulls that allowed us to rest on the shoulders of creation. The hills of skulls bearing this anatomy: we need to be 'right', we need to be 'ready' and we need to be anything but ourself.
As it is one thing to rest on the shoulders of creation and another to reside in its heart. Its heart knowing circulation only happens in the opposite of separation. And I wonder what is the opposite of separation? It could very well be the shape of absence. The shape of absence that only emerges when a sun dial exposes shadow. Where both sunlight and shadow can be respected in the twilight of this now.
Francis Weller gave to the shape of grief in his own practicing in this twilight:
Having worked with people for more than thirty years in my practice, it is clear to me that finding a target to blame is effortless. Nothing is asked of us when we simply assign fault to someone else for the suffering we are experiencing. Psychology has colluded in the blame game, pointing an accusing finger at our parents. While many of us suffering mightily because of unconscious parenting, we must remember that our parents were participants in a society that failed to offer them what they needed in order to become solid individuals and good parents. They needed a village around them—and so did we. Of course we were disappointed by our parents. We expected forty pairs of eyes greeting us in the morning, and all we got was one or two pairs looking back at us. We needed the full range of masculine and feminine expression to surround us and grant us the knowledge of how these potencies move in the world. We needed to have many hands holding us and offering the attention that one beleaguered human being could not possibly offer consistently. It is our deep grief that the village did not appear.
As I read this, maybe it was unreasonable to expect love to be consistent from someone I knew to be struggling themselves. Though I am quite unreasonable in the wildness to say how I do still want to feel. How I am willing to feel the grief of the world in hopes that my tears will somehow wash us into the heart of the world. How I am willing to grieve how someone I loved has so lost love for myself. And how I am willing to return to that world of despair. Because I know that to be the entrance back into the village inside of ourselves.