Maybe You Can
(re-write)
.
There was a full-moon tonight, clouds clipped with its glow, a March wind blowing in my heart. Maybe she was right; I’m nothing but words on a page. I didn’t fill her life with a touch or tenderness.
Across the ocean, her light is fading.
It’s out there, somewhere. Some need, I guess. I don’t know. I do know a thing or two about humbleness. I know what is unattainable and free. I’ve been close to the Humpback whale, followed behind the dolphin’s flight, and get it that I live a charmed existence. Maybe it doesn’t matter if I don’t have the skill of an engineer, or the intrigue of a scientist, because I’ve got something. I can neither describe it nor paint it nor prove how it was, is, or will be. It’s just me, living in a privileged place and time. It’s just me, writing, not able to say how I feel — not in command of my flight toward or away, a pilot in a lost universe that was once her love.
So, the exploration begins to live without her.
I will never know if she is safe. That’s a heartache that has no measure.
Perhaps there can never be a past life, as indeed I will never live a future life. What is happening now is what I have, there can be no more. Either I grasp it and hold it dear to me, or I let go and spend a lifetime wondering. I want to believe there’s some reason for living that makes sense, some principle that will help me through the hard times. It’s not a religion; I tried that. In the end, it can only be what one feels for another person. It’s about trying to give the world my true self.
I wanted to give her love to the world. I wanted the world see how beautiful and strange and profound her love was. I have no other way of explaining my life right now. That is so odd. There is no tactful way of saying this, but she had no idea how long I had been searching.
I have the courage to accept not being loved, but not to stop loving. So, I trace her smile with my index finger in spilled sugar, push her hair just so, sink into the ocean of her eyes, and sleep to the sound of her breathing.
With her I felt I was nothing ordinary. I was an adventurer caught up in someone else’s life.
What shameful days am I trying to forget? Yes, people are curious to see beneath the mask, me the fool, the knave. But she; she was a galaxy of women. I was never a womanizer. I just wanted to be in love… or at least understand what passed for love in the eyes of the world. Instead, I found that which most of the world is still looking.
But tragedy was always hiding in some midnight place.
Pain never hides, it haunts. It haunts me to this day. Dear God, King Arthur, and Merlin, please let me have her love back. Let her become a beautiful, delicate woman in love with a man who has broken every rule of decency in his quest to be the one chosen, and none other.
Love, we all know, is full of collateral beauty. There are those who believe and those who will never believe in the broken heart, the indecency of love. I could know her again, for she was truly beautiful, even if she could sometimes fill a sky with storms. I know, I know, these are just poetic words for a sensible woman… there was nothing of value in my written word.
She needed those words in her ears. Warm and tingling.
She was the commandment of my life. Today, I cannot kiss her, hold her, or lose her. I cannot. What pain there is in loving. So, I’m alone…and now my secret world is in danger.
Such anxiety you cannot imagine.
Maybe you can.
