chickens

I don’t think I ever told you, my spouse, or anyone that where you live is part of what I loved about you.  Background that never gets mentioned but sets the scene for everything.  I’m crying tonight about the feral chickens I’m not going to see, the lush plants you’ll never teach me, the walks we’ll never take, the humidity I’ll never feel on my skin or in my lungs.

Nothing to do with sex or even conversation.  The place there, that I needed.

I was lying in bed, and my spouse was putting away laundry.  I lay on my side in my chonies, holding myself to myself, losing you more and more.  You become a tiny point, so far away I can’t see you, or can’t differentiate you from another speck.  It hurts so bad.

I told my spouse about you, “He was more real to me than anything.  I didn’t need to see him with my eyes or touch him with my hands for him to be real to me.  But some people, they could see you with their eyes and touch you with their hands, but you will never be real to them.”

to use

Too true.  People who can’t see past their own nose.  Or who treat everyone as a resource to use.  I thought it was rare, just sociopaths.  Now I see it’s pretty normal.

I think you didn’t do enough LSD, or you’re not crazy enough, that the inner world is important enough to you.  Well, you don’t need to be like me.  But it’s funny you told me you did enough LSD.  I don’t agree.

Makes me think of this quote from a Rumi poem, not the translation I was looking for!

We all need to eat and pay rent, to stay functional enough to survive.  But I criticize you: You’re too much hustle, not enough love.

My inner life is everything to me.  My imagination is outlier good.  Crying because I lost you, so real, but if I tell someone the story, they have no idea.  You were some guy I met on the internet and talked to for a year.  They have no idea what happened inside me–how I changed.  If they can’t see something or measure it, it doesn’t matter to them.

laughing

I was crying about you, then laughing about something else in the same minute, talking to my spouse, as the tears were wet on my face.  I felt deeply grateful that my moods change and I don’t get stuck in a feeling.  Patterns can repeat, so I might seem stuck in a problem, as seen from the outside.  But my feeling state changes a lot, which is important.

So I was nuts about something I was learning, in reference to the Caribbean, and realized no one knew that my hunger for learning about the part of the world you live in was part of my love for you, or that the part of the world you live in even really matters to me.

There are so many things I love.  I’m extremely good at that.  If I told everyone everything that I love, that’s all we would ever talk about.  One long list!

ritual

I need to do another ritual, to say goodbye to the tropical plants and the neighborhood chickens I will never know.  Your house that I loved, but will never enter.  The garden, the spiders, the messy places you didn’t want me to see on a polo.

I need to let all of that go, now.  It’s like I was already there.  I’m holding a place for the chickens in my heart, but I need the space back.

Maybe one day, someone else will show me a manatee or teach me the characteristics of different kinds of mango trees.  Someone who cares enough to invite me, and welcome me.

Hopefully a lady who knows how to love, feel, and communicate, and who likes chickens.  Someone who wants me there.  I will hold her, and kiss her hands, if she likes that.