comforter

They come and I am happy to tell them. I speak in the cultural language of understanding. It gives me very little time to focus on my own unraveling. It also leaves me time for intimacy without touching what God has asked me not to touch.

I could find tragedy in this loneliness.. except I’m holding all my teeth in, my eyes are forming ice castle as I realize .. how severe your loneliness truly must be. Like me your threads are starting to pull. It is not my finger on this trigger.

My anger is moving into a shame and out of regret and into hearty laughs, cause I know.

The story doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s all the history. The history isn’t here, it is there. I am not there, I am here. You walk around the house, like a growing fungus and I need to fall down, just so I can get up having done something without you.

So I tell them the things I know. The things I may have told myself if my own ears were visible to me, if my own heart was in allegiance with me. I tell them cause I won’t hear myself, not even in the words I tucked away, not in the drafts unpublished or in the rafters I hung from in our first year. I have been saying all this for years, and it is no comfort

Art credit: Jana Sojka n.d.