Honestly, I don’t feel like writing another f’n break-up poem but no one told my pen.

Clearly, it is not yet done.

My puppy just had surgery ten days ago and today she was freed from the cone around her neck. That cone was to protect her from ripping open her stitches before she was healed. She can’t stop licking her scar. Her tongue keeps going at belly and the space she’s been itching to scratch.

I’m kind of doing the same, but it’s my heart I’m going at.

I kept myself from writing too much right away because I didn’t make the pain worse. But now I keep at the same spot where love once was and I’m not sure if I’m trying to open or close the wound. Maybe both.

I’ll be glad to pick my head up and get back to the fetching part of life soon enough.

But even as I lament my lamenting I’m grateful for the gift of emotions.

There was a time when it felt like a supreme accomplishment to treat an ex like they were easy to get over and so totally and completely optional and non-essential that their departure didn’t impact my life in any way. It was bullsh*t bravado which made me feel less vulnerable, tough and no doubt fueled my passion for carbohydrates.

It was also mean.

I wanted the other person to believe that hadn’t mattered all that much to me and that there absence created no void in me.

Now, I know it bravery that allows me to feel his departure as well as his presence and arrival in my heart. He mattered and was central to my life for a time that once seemed it might stretch into forever. That will always be the truth even though what we had wasn’t the kind stuff builds up and out of side by side.

My heart knows it had a visitor it loved who is now gone.

When I get a late night or early morning message I think it’s him before I remember we’re not. He’s who I think of when birds hover close to the water or I see someone out on open water. He made an impact and stretched the parts of life I pay attention to, care and know about.

I’m in a break-up, but it’s not the shattering or too shut down to notice the gifts. There’s so much I’m grateful for.

He didn’t read my blogs, so I don’t have to worry about him reading this now. I have no worries about his eyes on my words or what’s fair to say or not. We didn’t share friends, schools, work places or churches so there’s no overlap and fretting about expressing.

This writer is grateful for that too.

And so I surrender to another break-up poem:

The questions I want to ask can’t be answered. I have to learn to let them linger on my tongue, dissolve—get sharp before disappearing.

Shapes once hard and sweet

melt in my mouth.

All the sucking I have done becomes me.

Does it matter where the questions come from? They belong to me now.

Like the debris dropped on my lawn by the ocean after the last flood.

Snow goes and plastic mixes with seaweed, dirt and driftwood.

“Not my mess,” I want to yell but there’s no denying its my lot.

I see a man I could like and want to call you to tell you about him.

Imagining you both talk about nature and boats first, seconds before

I realize my old lover won’t greet my new lover at coffee.

Desire and answers let me take a break

from how tart the taste.

What was solid evaporated into me.

Even my thoughts about us can’t be shared with you.

So what good are the questions I can’t stop asking.

Answers I want to collect, in a pile I can finger

and display on my mantle like rocks, shells and touchstones.

You once wanted to know

the significance of what I did or did not

treasure.

You are now among the objects I’ll someday discuss

as memory, passion or time in my life.

What could an answer do

bigger than what’s been done?

Grieve with Spirit or the sky and the sun will still shine.

Celebrate with God or the ground and the night still follows.

The clock keeps moving even though we stopped.

I’m jealous of her hands.

 

 

Relephant:

How to Recover From a Break Up the Healthy Way.

 

 

Author: Christine “Cissy” White

Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: jinterwas/flickr. 

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