divorce

poem: loss (我不想再爱你了)

Only through 
Ghostly echoes
Of old posts and emails
Can I point to any given
Moment and say:
This…
This was the beginning 
Of our end;

Only now that the smoke
Of my affection
Has cleared
Can I see the place
Where my last,
Desperate attempt
To keep loving you
Died.

When I was in it,
I thought I’d hang on
Until The End of the World;
But I guess
The apocalypse
Came and went 
While I was looking
The other way. 

Now I’m adrift with
Memories sudden
And unbidden:
Your smile, your laugh 
Your gesticulation –
Scattered ashes;
A corpse is required for a resurrection 
You didn’t even leave me a grave
To mourn beside.

poem: gold/dust

A gold ring with a single diamond 
Sits on a shelf collecting dust
And I’m trying not to let this affect my trust issues, but to me
Love
Is not something to be taken lightly –
Love
Is something to be treasured, nourished, protected –
Love
Is sometimes enough.  

And maybe it wouldn’t have gone so hard on me 
If I hadn’t sunk myself so deeply into this,
If I’d learned to recognize the warning signs 
And walked away in time 
Before my life was you, and you – 
You were somebody else. 

But you see – 
I’ve always been most comfortable
In the company of my own making
It’s not that I’m antisocial – people fascinate me
But I find being around them draining,
Maintaining this smile isn’t as easy 
As you might think
Sitting around waiting for gaps in the 
Conversation, so I could speak, 
And the white noise of my past relationships
Has always drowned out my identity
And swallowed my aloneness.   

And then I found – You. 
Someone I never got tired of being around
Someone who just got me
With you, I could be quiet.
With you, I could be the truest version of myself. 

Until one day, I noticed – you stopped getting me
You didn’t really see me
So I learned to shout. 
And then I thought – it’s because 
I was SHOUTING 
So I learned to -whisper-   
I learned to exist 
In the hairline fractures
Of our turbulent silence. 

I promised to love, cherish and respect 
Until death do us part 
And my vow
Was the glue that held us together 
My vow
Kept me taking you back and forgiving you time and again
For these shitty awful situations you put me in
My vow
Was the glue that held ME together.

Then it ended, 
Not with a whimper but a bang
And it was me who pulled the trigger
It was me who stood there
with the smoking gun in my hand
I tried to take it back
and tell you I didn’t mean it
but we both knew that I did –
And the words wouldn’t leave my mouth…

They wouldn’t leave my mouth.

blog: on tangos

When I promise forever, I mean it.  when I commit, I commit.  And because I am committed, I will address any threat to the health of the relationship as soon as possible.  I will try to find solutions to any problems that arise.  I am willing to refine, change and adapt myself (within the parameters of my ethics and standards of course) as the situation dictates. And I will maintain an unshakeable faith that things will be ok and that we can do this. 

Hopefully there are many, many people who feel the same passion and conviction towards their own relationships.  But for a relationship to be workable and stable enough to overcome obstacles thrown at it, it requires the same buy-in, the same level of commitment and faith from the other person in the equation. 

And if they choose not to provide that, if they lose faith and walk away, that’s a choice they make hopefully with their best interests in mind. It doesn’t mean that they don’t value you or the relationship and all the history you share; it just means they didn’t value it enough to justify remaining in the relationship.  It just means that they have chosen to value other things more highly.

It’s instinct to blame and be angry, or to analyse “what went wrong”, when we go into things with expectation and optimism and come out the other side disappointed and diminished.  You feel a loss more keenly when it happens against your will.  And all too often we rush to fill the void with something new or different because the gaping hole of the broken relationship reminds us that we have bared and shared our soul only to have been rejected.  Or we try to hang on, dragging ourselves and our former partners into a drawn out and tortuous limbo. 

Nothing will ever come from trying to breathe life into a corpse. Take a few moments to assess what happened, but don’t obsess. Give yourself honest feedback on what worked and what didn’t (and actually apply that to your future relationships, or you will repeat the same patterns). Take time to reimagine your context and your possibilities.  Be kind to yourself, but don’t over-indulge.  Acknowledge that it hurts, but assure yourself that the hurt will not last forever.  And if anyone tells you there are plenty of fish in the sea, smile and thank them for the environmental report, but re-learn how to “do you” before you go out and cast any nets. 

I’m working through this myself right now, and I don’t have any answers.  But I do know that it will be ok.  :)

blog: going through changes

I’d been meaning to change my phone passcode for a while, and last week finally got around to it. I picked an easy code, but for a whole week I’ve been typing in my old one without thinking and it’s not until my phone buzzes at me that I realise that’s not my code anymore.

And every time I type the wrong passcode it slams home that NOTHING in my life is what it used to be, and will never be that way again. And while there was a lot of stuff in my life that needed to change, I’ve also lost a lot of reasons to wake up in the morning. I’ve lost my hopes and dreams for the future, and now I have to get new ones, but I don’t want to and I don’t know how.

At the moment I’m just trying to put one foot in front of the other. I’m not the first person whose marriage failed and I won’t be the last. But it really hurts to breathe right now. I wake up in my new room and wonder why my walls are purple instead of white. I wonder where the cats are and why they aren’t beside me. I feel like if I walk out of the room I’ll see my ex partner sitting on the couch or in the kitchen cooking. I often wake up thinking I should check what he wants to do that day or what he wants for dinner.

It’s like for a second my brain rejects my reality because it doesn’t seem like it should be real. For a second I’m all confused, I don’t understand how I got here, and life without him in it just seems wrong. I’m sure in time I will make this all make sense, but right now the dissonance is killing me.

poem: silent scream

I wish I could give birth
to this silent scream.

I wish I could erase the words
“I haven’t been feeling well”
From your vocabulary.

I wish you could feel
How my heart drops in my chest
When you say them.

How you can render a glorious day
Into a magnificent lie
With five simple words
And turn memory
Into ashes in my mouth.

I wish I could give birth
to this silent scream.
Wish I could explain why my smile
Is crooked
And why sometimes I feel like
Running away.

With you,
there’s no more good days any more
Just good moments
Snatched from the teeth of the
Demon inside that wants to
Ruin everything.

I wish I could give birth
to this silent scream.