2004-01-12 at 5:29 p.m.
The words come slowly, jumbled, fragments of conversations remembered in the shower --
I feel those.
I let them sit with me all day and into the night and when the ache sets in, I let them cover me, this warm blanket of your words.
You ask me why I haven't called you and I have neither the words or the energy to find the words to explain why I have no interest in speaking to you. I could toss around the heavy words of emotion: manipulation, deceit, misery. I could confront you with your own sense of obligation rooted in a profound ambivalence or remind you of that day in which everything changed and many lives ruined for others, the way you spat out accusations. Instead, I resort to what I know best, to what you so effectively taught me: Silence
The beginning of the last half of something.
What amazes me is the way that this education is about the construction of mental and imaginative constraints. We are stripped of our creative selves that carry a profound sense of justice and equality. We are taught to think about certain things such as burdens and rules and standards and admissiblity. We are taught to reduce stories to equations, strip narratives from facts. This education is an exercise in forgetting how to feel.
For a few minutes, we linger in an awkward silense as if we all sense something pressing against the brim, as if we could skim off this upper layer of quiet. And once we ask the question and you begin to reveal the answers, the words come quickly and we are back to where we started.
We talk for at least 30minutes at night now, and I know it's because we are both in the same place - navigating this new place, swallowing our fear and finding the words to describe this new feeling that resides somewhere deep in the belly.
To you, I am grateful today. Never enough words.
We dig out from under the snow and I locate the words for the feelings that come today, the sudden shift in things, the feeling of longing and of missing you already.
Let the poems burn, or make the syllables political.
I sense it in myself: Everyone else's sadness I can bear, I have learned to slip around everyone else's sorrow pushing my body into the doorframe, and bending around the contours of the grief.
I just can't with you.
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