4 Truths and Then, What?
A Reluctant Poet
On the slower morning school drop offs, my eyes never meet my phone for the time or the sidewalk beneath my feet. I see the slight shade differences between mine, the baby and youngest brother’s hands. I see how the clouds cover, decorate or are absent from the sky. I feel in my right hip how well is slept the night before or stretched this morning.
I watch the leaves feel the wind as if they have their own understanding from branch to branch, species to species. My favorites are spruce, the most reactive to the smallest breeze. Their rapid flipping looks so much like twinkling.
Sometimes my ears are full of the comforting voice of a friend. Sometimes there’s music that shifts the pace of my steps. There may be conversation to enlighten my own thoughts and perspective.
For a total of 15 minutes, I am a fixture of nature. I am the most myself. I am the lover, the artist, the poet, the muse.
Then my key turns into my front door of 8 years and all the weight of life finds me again. I clean off our couch, put away our dishes in our kitchen, get ready for virtual therapy in our bed.
It always presents as exhaustion. Instant and persistent.
A Reluctant Lover
I have been carrying something dead and precious and beautiful and sacred alone for 3 years.
I spent year 1 speaking in riddles and ellipses and found myself bed-bound and swollen. Year 2 was full of attempts to be angry, independent and uncharacteristically argumentative. We’re at the end of year 3 and I’m arriving back to where I started without resistance.
Desire is religion to the yearner. Love is at the core of a poet. For all of my efforts to bury my heart - my capacity for devotion is boundless and the fear of that is a great ruler of my life.
I can recount each every kiss, exchange of passion, confession of love - each etched around my neck, wrists and ankles. Any heat brushed against me leaves a memory in it’s place.
Love is never past tense but everlasting and it permeates all aspects of my life. It is a blessing and a singularly draining experience.
It tugs at my head and shoulders and tear ducts each time I try my hand at what I’m told normalcy is.
Then we check in or pass off and have to pretend not to be magnets, puzzle pieces.
A Reluctant, Newly Single Wife
I lift my head in anticipation of the loaded moment of eye contact. Something honest, unspoken, forbidden by the heteronormative arbitrators of traditional optics. Sometimes it escapes through our lips, our hands in a innocently intended hug, our throats open to the words we aren’t allowed to say.
My final act of devotion was agreeing to everything I never wanted. I uphold it by keeping the truth on the other side of our condo door, under the covers of our bed that’s just supposed to be mine now.
I met the gazes of people who think I’m younger and live a less serious life. They don’t know that I can’t make room. They don’t know that I am living sacrifice. Marked at the top of the cliff of another man’s desires and they are exactly mine.
They can’t know about the 5 years into a serious commitment it took me to trust the man I was already sure about. That my love language is founded in submission and that is the opposite of who I am in the world they see me in right now.
The honey that falls from my lips is measured and practiced and the rest is reserved.
No one realizes how true it is when I say that I don’t value the sanctity of marriage as we’ve been taught to understand it. I don’t value the production or performance.
They misunderstand the optics of romance with the potentially monstrous reality of what loving selflessly and unconditionally can be.
A Reluctant Individual
Solitude absent of obligation is my favorite kind. I know it seldomly in the outcome of collective choices I live now. I say this with no malice or regret, it just is, as most things are.
I forget myself often. Meals, plans, medical appointments. So much of my self investment in my adult life has been saturated with a longing to never lose approval. Not yours, of course.
I grapple with the desire to destroy and rebuild my surroundings and self anew. If I can just make it like I never allowed myself to be consumed, then I would no longer be preoccupied with everything that knowing it before left behind.
My armor is my ability to not seem bothered or sad or stuck. I lean on half truths to sustain good posture and the illusion of function.
At the moment, I deeply desire platonic bonds and I fear them even more. Seeing me clearly is all and nothing I want. To be loved and understood in tandem, impossible for a poet.
When I meet those curious irises, they meet his. When I go to tell the truth, it catches in my throat and I turn to stone. Or I sit high above my body, in my mind while I recount things that wound me deeply as if they are not hurting me now.
If you stand too close, you’ll see that merely a shadow of longing, grasping for the phantom feeling of being wrapped in frame of perfectly shaped shoulders.
Much like the the little spruce leaves, I am affected at the slightest reminder. Longing for more than just 15 minutes in the presence of something that feels bigger, better than the heaviness of an unyielding devotion.