If you love something...

What-ever.  You know how it goes.  Stupid.  Not playing that game now.  There's a poster in Jacobs' room that says, "In life, there are no make-up exams."  That's right, there aren't.  But enough of stupid, angsty cliches...

I believe the world...or maybe not the world--maybe just me...I will soon learn something real about the strength or the frailty of friendship.  How strong and steadfast or or weak and fragile.  It's certainly not been a friendship that was well-maintained.  We have beaten, battered, tested, teased, challenged, abused, insulted, argued and fought in the two years we've known each other.  And still, it has survived.  Because of the HeartLink.  Gosh, I'd almost forgotten about that. The HeartLink, like so many other things, taken it for granted.  

How far can elastic be stretched
before it snaps?
With machetes
we hack away at that taut slender tendril
we weaken and burn it
with the venom of hatred
each denying its very existence

The Golden Compass is shattered
and the band will play on


So much for my attempt to write a sad poem in my journal and move on.  

I broke a hard-fast rule.  Ha.  I probably broke several.  But the one I KNOW I broke is this:  "Never, ever deliver a mortal blow."  In the 23 years of marriage, of arguments, of fights, as angry as I have sometimes been, I have never uttered a unforgivable word to him.  Not so, here.  We both cast an Unforgivable Curse--I with actions, he with words.  Ah, well.  It can't be undone now....

It's been a long, hard week.  There's still more of it left.  Must, must stay focused and continue to soak up the hugs and smiling faces of happy parents and ecstatic children.  This is what sustains me and blocks the passage to the underworld.  But what about next week, when the applause and laughter fade.  What demons will haunt me then?  What has been so solidly tamped down all this week will eventually come bubbling to the surface.  How lonely and sad...or...happy and free?  Who knows?  Right now, I only feel blank.  Dead.  Flatline.  It feels a lifetime since I turned to look at the doorway and saw and felt that overwhelming warmth of love...


I believe, ahead, there is planned negotiations with a mediator present.  A grand Festivus Airing of the Grievances.  There are those in the periphery that are interested in our continued alliance.  There are those who are not.  Am I?  Is he?  Time passes, and we settle into new shoes, new clothes, new single-half self-images.  The strangeness of the New Reality eventually becomes comfortable.  How much time is too much time?  How much spilt blood can be mopped up?  Is there time at all?


I dunno.  I just don't know.  And I got poems to write.