heart

This is the long haul, the fullness of the full moon, the unknown arc of the rest of a life. This is the flesh wounds, the slings and arrows, the dirge of dashed hopes. This is the moon pushing through the haze, long into its becoming, framed in your window finding you. It has been a long time since we were lovers, a long time since we were even friends. I was ever a lapse in judgement, the folly of a wild hair, a transgression at my best. You were a blessing and a revelation, a deep desire and a sheer delight, like a wish on a lucky star favoring my keening whims. You were gone before I knew it, an idle rumor I had turned into an act of faith. I clung tight, and you had no talent for ridding yourself of dead weight. I was your foolishness, and I became a fool for you.

It was impulse, it was infatuation. It was a break in the routine. For me it was a rebuilt foundation, the thought I might actually mean something to someone else, that there might be some worth to my shitty life. I didn’t know I was too far gone until you were long gone without a word. Then came letters, kind but lawyerly, words meant to give nothing away. Letters that landed more than wrong, that seemed mocking and cruel to my devastated heart and quickly spinning mind. The contempt I felt from them may be real, and given the reason why you ghosted, well deserved. My constant raging, my lack of much of anything but anger and bitterness would be more than enough to disgust anyone, let alone a soul as sensitive to mood as a seismograph to the temblors deep in the earth. You are through, and yet it seems my heart is just getting started.

I will never know the whole story, but I know I had always hoped for more than you or credulity would allow. I will never hold you again in my arms, but my heart holds you more dearly than you can know. An old man unsuited to be anyone’s suitor, still in love with you despite all sense and propriety. Like the others you have collected in your wake, tumbling like so many dead leaves after your hems and heels. I know I am at most an object of shame and pity, more likely an albatross you’d just as soon forget. But I hold you as most precious for your gifts to the world, your peerless talents, and your steady striving to do good in this battered, vandalized world. Your missteps and your deceptions, to others and yourself, seem small compared to how hard you try every day to give everything away, how determinedly you work to heal the wounds you witness all around. I am in love with you in capital letters and bold type. I am in love with you though it is like loving starlight that’s reach was a remainder of a shine that long since changed directions. Your light still touches my heart, however long ago it stopped shining on me.