Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-08-08 - 10:17 a.m.

Broken Bits

The broken relationship is an odd prism - I look one way and see one view. A slight turn yields a different picture. This is the good, the passion, the harbor; this is the distance, the alcohol, the confusion. I can't integrate.

When I find myself staring melancholy into scenes of love and comfort, when I feel myself broken beyond redemption, I turn the prism. Yes, but THIS is how it was, too. One thing is an antidote for the other. And then I know that this was a good thing, but oh the lonely --

What price will we pay for harbor? For the ability to be, simply be, and know that in our being we are loved? Does it matter that we are loved not always for who we are but for what we will tolerate?

In my dim moments I think I will go back, crawl back into that bed, bury my head in what was once safety, revel in feeling wanted.

I know I won't. I was leaving for the longest time.

It's hard, out here.

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Later, this is what I will say was hard: not the lonely, not the times you might have called before and now you don't, but the unexpected finding of your underwear still in my laundry basket, the intimacy untreasured, the dailiness of us.

Not the way I want to share something good that happens, because you didn't listen much; not the way I want to share the things that hurt or make me happy and now you are not there, because you were not really there for a long time, but the way you let me love you, when you did.

Not the times I hear our song because we never really had one, except the one we wrote together, and I won't hear that played again. Not the music you played for me in the beginning that I had not heard for so long, not the way we sang together sometimes even though you often started singing something different when I hummed, but the way you played the piano when my daughter played the flute, and made me for a moment complete in that joy.

Not the way we cooked, dancing in the kitchen, feeding a mass of children in love and chaos until we were consumed by that chaos and I could not find a quiet moment in which I could be queen, not the way the way you kissed me and the kiss tasted of the wine you had hidden, but sometimes the way I see my shoulders in the mirror and remember that you loved them and know that no one will love these shoulders again in just that way.

Later, this is what I will say was hard: not the letting go of you, but the letting go of us. Not the who we were, but the who we wanted to be. Not the road to hell, but all the good intentions.

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