1. a lover to call my own
I want to be honest with myself, positive affirmations are good six days a week but on the seventh I am just sad thinking of you. The pain is felt deep within my belly. I can no longer decipher whether I’m aching for you or aching because of you. Or whether it could ever be one or the other. You’ve had a hold on me for so long and what I imagine will be forever but in lessening degrees like the descending line of a bar graph until the dotted lines run out of paper. I can’t say with confidence that there’s been a day since I met you that I haven’t thought about you. And yet you are something that never was and something that never will be. Never in the way that I wanted you. You circle around but I wanted to build the path forward with you.
And I’m mad, too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that sad and mad rhyme. They ping-pong my feelings like couplets in a poem consuming all of my words. I’m mad that you would come back one last time before ripping yourself out of my life. There was nothing gentle about it. I’ll never understand why you did that. Why you didn’t just leave me alone once you met someone new. It’s so much more painful for me to move on after I had you for a few shining days. But below all of this lies a darkness, the underbrelly of sadness and madness is shame. How could I pour so much love into a person who in the end didn’t say one nice thing back to me. The last I’ll ever hear from you is you begging me to leave you alone. Ending with words you don’t really mean, one more time. I should’ve known you would. But you should’ve known better too, look how that worked out for you last time, my love.
The sadness, the madness, and the shame; it’s a well of emotions I’ve labeled as humiliation. Because how could my output of love be so different from yours? Why do I hold you in such high regard and yet you don’t hold me at all? Why is it so easy for me to tell you how I feel, yet you can never find the words? Is it because the truth of why you left is too hard to admit or because you haven’t uncovered it yourself? Tell me, it’ll be of no surprise to me. I already know it. It is because you do not find yourself worthy of my grand love. My love was a mountain you stood at the foot of with no gear to climb it, not even a positive mindset to get you in motion. We’re told people are dying to be loved yet when I filled the glass and handed it to you, you smacked it out of my hands and walked away as it shattered. I picked up the pieces of us, for you, for now. I promise to never turn the glass shards into weapons but the brokeness will be yours to live with. And what a shame that is.
I’m embarrassed by how much I’ve written about you. The synthesizing of our synergy has filled up so many of my blank pages. But I wouldn’t dare to make you my creative inspiration. It’s not inspiring the way you left me. You made yourself out of me and then told everyone it was you. You may be fooling everyone else but I know where the credit is due. You wouldn’t have New York if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t live where you do if it wasn’t for me. You took everything from me but you forgot that I never needed any of that. It was you who was lost, not me.
I don’t hope for you to be happy, happy is easy. I hope the birds and the flowers are happy. With you, I have a much grander vision. I hope you live your purpose. I hope your new love stirs up within you those dusty, old ambitions of grandiose you had when we first met. I hope you change the world like you always wanted to. The thought of you not changing the world because I broke your illusion of it could make my whole world crumble. Please, tell me that isn’t the case. I didn’t know what love was back then. But I know that’s what you were trying to give to me. The only problem was - you didn’t know how to love. Two lovers destined to be together and neither one of them with a clue on how to love. That’s our story.
I wish we figured it out together. I wish we were gentler with one another. I wish we were tender. I wish we didn’t care what other people thought. I wish you didn’t care that more than only me was starting to love you. I wish we focused on eachother and not everything else. I know our love would’ve moved oceans. We would’ve crashed into the shores of hurt souls and washed away their pain. Leaving sparkles to glimmer in the wake, we’d guide our tribe to their own peace and love. Our children would’ve been awesome. I can see them, even now. I can feel them too. So full of my energy and wisdom, so full of your charm and ambition. They would’ve seen the world so clearly having our visions of love as their parents. They would’ve alchemized the energy of anyone who walked up to life with hate. They would’ve been alchemists out of the womb. They would experience so many great loves, the ones we both missed out on in our youths. Because we felt misunderstood. Because we stood for love in a time of lust. Their heartbreaks would make them stronger and we’d convince them of this through our own story. We may have never been and never will be, but I know it was love. It’s not the kind of love story that sells movie tickets, not with this ending. But that’s what makes it our own. It’ll never be anyone else’s. As much shame and regret is riddled within it, it is ours.
I pray with time you gain clarity. Although I fear you’ll never reach for it, you’ll hold the knowing deep within the pockets of your mind. And then one day, when you’ve lost the sense of fear for it, you’ll take it out of your pocket like an old bumble gum wrapper and it’ll be clear as day to you. I hope that one day I can feel it without needing your words to tell me it. I know I won’t forget you. I’ll be in the old folks home thinking of you with a smile and a wet face, wondering how it all turned out. There will be a piece of me carried by the palms of your gentle soul. I pray the sadness, the madness, the shame and the humiliation disipates with time. I know it will. I pray I get to experience a love like no other, one that is as grand as my love. I pray that one day all of these lessons you opened me up to, come to meaning with a lover I can call my own. I want to be someone’s lover. I want to have all the things I never got with your love. And all the dreams I imagined of our love - those are mine. This love will always be mine because you never claimed it yours.