Election Night

I had felt this way for some time, but nothing about it registered until we were waiting for our table at my favorite restaurant in the city and one that I suspected you probably (I learned later, definitely) hated. It was small and filled with democrats and grad students clinking glasses, chanting 4 more years louder with each round. Your hand would tighten on my knee each time someone would knock into me or jab you with an elbow. With every smile, I felt my lips loosening your clenched jaw.

As far as I was concerned, we could have been the only two people at that bar. We stole kisses from one another like we were alone on my couch. And I felt every word you said, every story you shared pulled me further to you. I sunk into your soft voice and closed my eyes, burying my head against your shoulder. To this day, I can still feel your happiness as we sat looking through pictures. 

I tell people I don't cry. I am a lot of things: tough, independent, driven. I'm stubborn, determined even known to be cold at times, but emotional? I'd say no. Most people would tell you confidently that I could hold my own in a crowd, on a stage - under the heat of distress my convictions have carried me. But you, you saw what others haven't.

It was my tears in the middle of the night that jolted you awake and back to the reality you tried to push us from. You found my sadness among the insecurities that leave me awake. You searched my darkness and promised to soothe the anxieties I successfully kept hidden for 25 years. You pulled each one out into the light and set free. 

I have since cried in front of complete strangers. Falling apart in the arms of people I've never met, hoping that I will look up and see you reaching down to tell me I'm beautiful.  

I lay in the bed you built blocks for to stop from moving as I toss and turn. In the depth of my subconscious I still believe I will feel you when I reach behind me. I often look for you in the darkest time of night, when the silence is so heavy I can feel it against my chest. I am brought back to your bedroom, where the weeping willows once swayed along side us while it rained. You are lonesome for me too, I feel it. 

To see your darkness now scares me. It pulls me apart from the inside and seeps out, in a way no emotion has ever escaped me. I still believe in the goodness I felt when our hands found each other between bar stools and locked knees. Even now, as the wolves you threw me back to close in, I hold steady. The warmth of your heart still resonates within me and I am confident that its you who will save me. 

It was a Tuesday night in November when I realized that it was love that was I feeling- that I had been in love with you since the very beginning. 

Fiona, The Great

The morning woke me to face a destruction I wasn't use to.  As the sun peaked its head out from behind the clouds, I caught a smirk cross your beautiful face. It is the same soft voice that whispers good morning that also soothes me to sleep while windows shake. I toss and turn until you pull me into you.

 

My heart is heavy with your love. The saturation is so deep that there are times, when the moon is hanging low against the night, that I am stricken with the severity of just how I feel. I watch you sleep and want to know what you dream and what you fear. I want to know your stream of consciousness as you think it. It scares me how intensely I want to know you.

 

I find myself lost inside your gaze; the way time passes overcomes me so suddenly that I am left wondering if all of this is really happening. You are gone before I can truly apperciate the time we spend together. When you leave, I wonder if you feel the same torment I do.

 

I’m trying to figure out this path we are heading down. It is obvious that I am already well on my way into the darkness of the woods. The questions that I twirl around meet me at the next mile marker but instead of stopping to face them, I let branches pull me into you. 

 

I am scared now that the sun has set but you promise to guide me out safely. The road is closed but I continue down it; in the end this blame will be mine to bear.

 

The End

'If this is the end,'  she thought,  'then let the world split open at the seams and swallow my heavy heart into it's darkness.'

Niagara is Steady

I'm saying that I want to know you; and I do at the time- more than I have ever wanted to know another being.
You're eyes feel honest when I look into them. The soft, calculated words you use create a comfort I am not use to. This comfort is short lived though and once you are gone so is the calmness you created. When we sleep, I toss and turns.
Our bodies crush together only to break apart by morning.
It's dark when you leave and I have a hard time falling asleep once you're gone.
The weight of what we have done sits on my chest.
Outside my window I can see the sun rising and the reality begins to set in as the wind blows my blinds up.

Love

"It's like putting a label on love. To say, 'You are, forever, my soul mate,' is almost like knowing the end of a story. When you fall madly in love, you think it is forever, and it might be and it might not be - what matters is not to label it."

How to Save Your Own Life

Follow the rules all of your life. Be lazy. Lazy enough to not get into a good private college out west or a mediocre SUNY school in central New York. Be motivated enough to graduate high school not a virgin, with a handful of friends and a handful of good memories that you can use in your yearbook quote.

Follow the path of least resistant. Take the news that your parents are having another baby for face value. Join the Army, Marines, Navy, hell you sign up for the circus. Just get out.

Have fun while you are away: too much fun, with new people in new places. Meet strangers who will one day ask you to be in their wedding. Get a taste of freedom through your travel. See America and feel the heat of a summer spent in the Carolinas. Never fully forget how the sun beat so deliberately against back while you run along vineyards and shorelines.

Excel at the program you chose- whatever it may be. Graduate with honor, graduate with a job and a fiancée to go home to. A dog waits for you –  no – two dogs. Two dogs, a wife and a house. Come back aged, but not withered. Come back and feel the sun differently.

Have a backyard ready for barbecues and birthday celebrations. Fill your house with pictures of your dogs at parks and your wife with sunsets behind her, in a long white dress, lying on a hammock, you cooking over a fire.

Wake up mid-way through your thirties and feel short of breath. Become alarmingly aware of the receding hairline you see in the mirror. Drive to work every day and think about cutting off tractor trailers that would never be able to stop in time. Allow these images to consume you. Arrive at work and have no recollection of how you got there.

Enjoy everything less. Fantasize more about nothing; traveling, the Carolinas during the summer, your youth; fantasize about young coworkers and zero in on the new girl. See her everywhere.

Go home and spend your weekends looking through photo albums. Have no memory of being in any of the places you’re pictured. Feel numb when you look through your wedding album. Feel the clock on the wall watch you try to remember holiday parties and birthdays where you look happy. Recognize your smile.

Befriend, then call her - this co-worker. This distraction, obsess over her. Late at night when you stumble home, sit on your porch and whisper into the phone. Tell her she’s beautiful. Tell her you have never felt this way before. 

Watch her eat up your words. Watch her fall in love with your sincerity and unfaltering calmness. Let your insecurities float through the air of her second floor apartment. Embrace that way she soothes your worries with a finesse you are not use to.

Tell her these things. Find yourself telling her the things you have never told anyone.  Feel light when you are with her. Get lost in the details of her smile while you work side by side. 

At home, sleep beside your wife. Feel what you can only assume is guilt. Wake up at the end of March and leave. 

Leave your house key. Leave your wedding band.  Leave and watch in the rear view mirror as your house explodes with sweater vests and running shoes. Consider going back for the first dog.

Drive the coast up to New England and spend the weekend intoxicated, texting her and drinking Johnny Walker with your cousin. Feel alive and at peace with the decisions that led you here. Don’t think about it for more than a cheers worth of time. Call her. Tell her you want her. Feel elated when she says she wants you too.

Be happy. Go back to work and hate it. Less with her by your side. Surround yourself with her. Be everywhere she is.  Watch her eyes when she notices your ring is gone.

Make your move. Be in the moment and feel the blindness lift; see her so clearly you are afraid to blink. Stay the night. And be tired the next day. Tell her it’s worth it and think you mean it. Tell her you will always stay the night and think you could probably mean that that too. Listen to her heels click as she approaches your office. Take the long way to the bathroom to cross paths.

Let your phone begin to disrupt dates. Let your other life seep into this new escape route you have mapped out. Let the laziness return. Ignore the signs until she can no longer ignore the signs. Don’t argue when she says you told her “I feel so connected to you” because that sounds like something you would say.

Quit your job. Tell your friends and family you are going back to school. Let her support you while everyone is talking you out of this decision. Let her optimism wash over you and her drive seduce you.  Don’t say good bye on your last day. Just leave.

Lay in your parent’s pool on hot summer days and think about high school, try to remember the girl’s name that you first slept with. Call your friends that you lost touch with through the years; make plans to visit Boston and Chicago. Go to Pittsburgh and feel relieved on the ride there. Don’t think about anything but being consumed by where you are.

Arrive home and feel weathered. Sink into the pool; think about how you got to this point. Think about the tractor trailers and the highways, the money, your dogs waiting for you to never return. Think about the last time you saw her. Think about how easy it could be to just let your legs go limp. Slide under the water silently and count the slow thumps of your heart.

Right Now

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this." 

-  Henry David Thoreau