I'm so raw still. It's been almost five years since my son's mom and soul mate felt she had to leave us. There's several times I've nearly gone that way myself. My intellect and reason sometimes saved me- our wee boy. Once it was either fate or luck. But I'm glad to feel out of that deep craggy pit. One year after, my mother then comitted suicide. Partly out of guilt because she felt she enabled my wife's actions that day and partly out of her own desperation for relief- she had battled leukemia, breast cancer that wreaked havoc on her and set off a landslide of other serious diseases. There has been so many times that I have thought was having such right thoughts and growth towards closure, but every time it seems like a new round of 'negative' and desperate hurt just builds back up and cancels any and every thought inch of headway to healing.
A met someone today, she stopped me in tracks and asked why I have such sad eyes- I didn't feel particularly sad at the time either. I hesitated on blowing her off and she grabbed my arm and told me to tell her and I did, briefly. She asked for my email address and told me to have a blessed day. A few hours ago I received an email with three links for grief recovery. This place was one of those links.
A few days ago I was feeling so great about it all and thinking so clearly and I wrote a brief letter to my wife. Something I've always put off doing. Afraid of it making it worse. And then last night, I read it and spent hours and hours balling and crying out. It's confusing to feel so good then rather immediately so bad. It's been roller coaster that's not slowed down in 4.8 years. I feel like I need to share it with someone who can understand it.
It's been a rough journey since you have left. You were worthy of emptying a lot of hearts- You were paradise even in a tempest. But there were so few you let close to yours. When I met you my heart sang, while my head attempted to deny you for selfish and logical reason. It was only days after, that you rendered both our hearts and minds without choice. Your way with me, and mine with you. Our energies and their constant synergy was scary and seemed divine. So connected and dependant on each other we were, that we couldn't bare, throughout 5 and a half years, to spend more than a few hours, literally, not beside each other. Looking back on that fact, so often I feel that it could not have been healthy for two people to need each other like that. Then polarity strikes, and I think isn't that an ultimate love? I don't know. I'm torn between the two still. Let alone considering the factors of our destructions and how they affect what ever we had. Not knowing which is true has since crippled my boundaries of healthy, expressive interaction. A lot of people and even some professionals would say I focus too hard on questions that can't be answered. Maybe, but I don't get that. I know you wouldn't either. That's "why we have brains...to use them past the boundaries"... for truth and good, like you used to say to me when I'd get down for getting lost on the next thought.
Over the past few years I've felt a raw empty shell of existence. Questioning faith and purpose. And fate and failures. And me. So that it makes me doubt even more the truth of it all. Either it hurts so because of my dysfunction or because of loss of self we somehow joined to one. It's been a confusing thought and not one conducive to life or growth. That question alone, has hemmed me in more than any other. Upon realizing it's enormity within me, recently, I started having these lucid dreams of you and "msgs". Relentless they've been. Haunting and at first even literally sickening. But then they began a different path. They haven't led to a destination but rather a map maybe. One I feel may be a map to personal enlightenment and happiness. I don't know if I have manifested these lucid scenes out of subconscious desperation or if there is another force invloved or if it is both. But either way, I am grateful. It's a little soon to say, based on the past ( such such many hopes and fails of healing), but the struggles are starting to make sense I think. My ability to 'see' things in a clearer light; it's like an oxymoronic, simplified-complexity is starting to happily alight the dark. I beleive it may come from within me in these sudden a.m. dramas, out of the desperation I've felt in 'living' without you. Like I am finally vibrating narrowly into a more healthy and truthful line. Even knowing and feeling these things does nothing to fix real damage or the hurdles ahead. It's a long and difficult process I think to constantly shut - out the negative, invasive feelings and untrue thoughts and to focus instead on me and my healing, future, needs, and my growth- at any personal cost. In the latest two positive lucids of you, your voice, I have wide-eyed awoken and tried apply what intent I've gleaned. And I feel a little lighter and brighter because of it. I think this is the first time I've actually felt relief without lying about it or forcing it-faking it to make it. In the end there are still many more questions than answers, but I feel maybe they don't matter anymore, Ashleigh. At least, as much as I thought. I feel like I'm so much closer to letting go, so necessarily, of my heart and mind's grip on you.
We loved each other so deeply, possibly insanely. And alone by what we so eagerly, forgivingly put up with from one another; with dedication for what was next for us. I feel so guilty for not getting you more help for your bipolar disorder, Ash. Get for being out of town that day and night. The argument we had before I left. I'm so sorry. You needed me and only me and even though I was in your life and able, my own shortsightedness and even sickness ill-chained me. But I dont think any of that, guilt and regret, trauma, pertains to my future for any reason other than wisdom and learned-caution and maturation anymore. Because I refuse this slow sliding death a truely broken heart gifts.
I miss you right now, still, so much, but I know that is not relevant to my life anymore. It can't be, in truth. I can't expect to live any longer breathing air that's already been breathed. I think that is why I can't hear your voice anymore, save my lucids. And I will gracefully attempt to take a hint.
I hope you're sitting on your star now, my love.
----
A little child, a limber elf, Singing, dancing to itself, A fairy thing with red round cheeks, That always finds, and never seeks, Makes such a vision to the sight As fills a father's eyes with light; And pleasures flow in so thick and fast Upon his heart, that he at last Must needs express his love's excess With words of unmeant bitterness. Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm. Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty At each wild word to feel within A sweet recoil of love and pity. And what, if in a world of sin (O sorrow and shame should this be true!) Such giddiness of heart and brain Comes seldom save from rage and pain, So talks as it's most used to do.
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
- S.T. Coleridge
Thank you anyone who may read. Sorry for the long wind. I think I have kept it all pretty short in honesty.