Grieving

I am not feeling social...nor charitable...nor tolerant right now. I do not want to answer questions, talk about IT, or go to work. I don't want to sleep all day...although rest is what I am craving....I want to be alone but with someone at the same time who leaves me alone...knowing someone is in the house is enough.

Stretching myself out on the stone floor, I can feel the cool, uneven surface of the worn rock. Hundreds of feet have walked it smooth. I want to just lie here embracing this sanctuary in my mind, loving the solice and peace it offers.

Leave me to my grieving, for you can do nothing for me. No word or deed will stop the pain that tears at me. I pray for release that won't come right now when I want it. It eludes me, dancing around me as a shadow in the darkness...reaching out and drawing back in a ceaselessly taunting game. I live for seconds at a time when the agony subsides for just that brief span and then floods back in waves.

Blood coarses...bleeding out...an act of mercy and finality...virtually painless for you...and I am envious of your new freedom! I long for it like I longed for you in those nights to come to my door...my lover. I long for you again...aching with the knowing you will steal up on me and make me catch my breath...fingers brushing my skin....holding me in your arms...kissing me and claiming me...smiling like the dawn breaking...telling me to come away.

But until then...I wait with the longing...the anticipation for my lover to come in the night.

It was difficult to collect the thoughts I wanted to write. Difficult because me heart bleeds with it everytime I try. Raw and open and still bleeding....my blood flows into pools painting pictures of things from the past...a magic mirror changing and shifting in the tidal waves.

I think I have found it, again.

The words flowing and pounding against me, out of me, mouth open with the taste of seaweed and salt on my tongue....screaming with the voice of an albatross causht in the wind and suddenly being pulled upwards on the drafts

I am bound to this place as surely as if I were anchored in the rocks...waited down with chains of my own making that slowly turn to rust welding themselves to my bones.

Collecting pieces of the pictures in my head along with sand dollars and pebbles that will go into a jar on my side board in the desert. I long for the sea and the City. Long to see the ghosts shifting through time on the streets before me, before the shops and houses I walked on years before and walk on now.

I cling to the small bits of glass, stone and shells like a rosary to spell over and over...a lifeline to who and what I was and most surprisingly, still am....slowly releasing into what I will become and where we will be again. I am obsessed with it....only admitting it now....as a lover that has run away out of desperation and aching for return. I have run away too many times in my life and now realise I need run no more.

Acceptance is strange and familiar...looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing the child reflected back. My child was curious and bold, unafraid of climbing the dangerous rocks and walking the edge of the Marina walls while my Grandmother screamed out in warning. The sea was always below me and before me....the grand tightrope walk.

I went back to the hotel room that night sick and nerve shattered...wishing silently that I hadn't come this way...it was foolish and silly....throwing up all the years of fear and insecurity....purging my body and soul of the constant running from who and what I have always been....running from my Grandmother's boogie man...the wino in the bushes....running from self-imposed pain and my own reflection. I shed it off me as a skin and looked at it in wonder.

Why?

Habits die hard when you finally cut them down. It writhed and clawed out from within me as my stomach churned and spasmed in pain. A beast within tearing its way out one way or another...everything subsiding once I looked at it and ran my fingers through its fur and called it by my own name. I accepted my beast.

Exausted, but at peace, I fell into sleep next to Tony wrapped in the soft weight of the bedsheets and his scent. I drifted into sleep like a child.

I am going back on my terms....unafraid to climb the stairs and unlock the door of the house on the Marina that has always been mine....but only....only...if I wanted it bad enough.

The child is coming home.