Memories

Memories at this time of night, as dusk begins to grow, bleeding night into day arrive unbidden and from deep within, uprising.  I resist the urge to eat, my hunger is coming from my soul and my inner child’s need for my unconditional loving presence.  Can I sit with her a while and listen to her loneliness that is really of the past, the longing for someone interested in her day, instead of two adults focused on themselves and always looking the other way that I learned to revolve myself around?    Don’t let me silence her recollections of how it really was with food.

Another memory, of the day you left me finally, just over 13 years ago.  I drove you to the airport over 4 hours away and then punished myself by driving back alone to the house we bought after Cambridge was aborted, all alone despite offers of friends to let me stay and rest a while with them.  My soul can hardly bear to remember the pain.  I kept myself alone in that house, in retreat for so long.  It was such an old pattern, to go off alone after an ending or a death, after all it’s what I did when my Dad died.  When I left you two years earlier, you experienced what I went through and when you tried to say how lonely you were I could not hear.  I am so sorry, Jonathan. I hope you have love now.

Cards and calls came telling me you were thinking of me.   I know you loved me and were somehow setting me free for this deeper journey. It wasn’t a mistake no matter how much negative ego tries to tell me it was.  It was a painful repeat and one I had to live through to bring the past to consciousness.  I am glad you found love although it hurt a lot to know you moved on so quickly as you could not bear to be alone.  The day you told me in Chalice Wells garden was the day my heart broke all over again recalling the three painful breakups of years before.

Now as memories like these come and no body attack that is speaking of things in my cells, I can realise that now is now and then was then.  I am not really alone now entirely, as adult me is here and awake, present in the moment.  I did the best I could and so did you.  My parents did the best they could but it wasn’t enough for me.  No more denial…. I didn’t bring this on myself but never the less I have had to wear it!

It is what it is.  I have done my alone time.  Who knows what the future holds.  In the next relationship if I am blessed enough to find it, I will not be dragging along such a long package of baggage, the scars will be there but they will be evidence of wounds that in closing over in some way have healed or at least taught me essential lessons about what is most needed, important and valuable to me in this life.  I pray for another chance as I have so much love to give now that my grief is not longer as unconscious as it was.  I will not close the door on hope.