Losing track

poem for Sunday morning

The expanse of days in my wake taunt me, the promise of some fantastic future unrealized. Wonderment at the newness always wears off, like love, like the first day of school, like anything born to decay. Really and truly it has only been a minute, a brief but boisterous ride over the rapids. I lost my paddle somewhere but luckily the life vest I’ve been clinging to has morphed into my skin. This vessel is really all I have to call my own, nestled in the vast underpinnings of desire, regret, longing, and the deep divide of dissociation. I look back to see what has been dropped, my mind running up the path sincerely focused on a spot up ahead. The elusive near future I can’t ever touch, passing on the breeze like a gossamer dream. I wore the veil once or twice. Today my skin is raw, my back pops from cervical to lumbar freely, my soft belly a waving flag of defeat. While sleeping I see you, and remnants of you, and also you still. Your dog was there, diligent and destructive, a moniker of servitude. The many past lives in my memory melded into one seething house filled with circumstantial roommates, messes to clean, situations to explain, always the bold and glaring absence of you.

Rumination dominates my mind, wishing in vain that I had done things differently, that someone would have helped me, that surely this is not all there is. It’s not true or productive, I know. Awareness doesn’t stop the train from running past every stop, winding up the mountain just to push me off. The landscape of my thinking lately has been difficult to navigate. The grooves of all of my lives before are deepening, beckoning like sirens to lay in the tall grass. Honestly this is all that I desire, the ability to fully and completely exhale. My vigilance is a posture now, shoulders rounding in preparation. See, I knew you were going to be this way, I divined it four weeks ago. The evidence I’ve accumulated pushes me deeper into the darkness of solitude. Finally this morning, after brushing the dirt from my bed, I sobbed in the kitchen, plunging my hands into the scalding water so finally I could feel.

I quickly fell in love with the soft eyes of the woman at the coffee shop, so I looked away in disbelief before ordering a latte.