Bitterness

Last night, I went to sleep feeling guilty and woke up feeling worse. Who am I kidding? I'm not ready for love! I think I might be ruined for love.

Bitterness is overwhelming me. Self-pity and a feeling of victimization is also growing within me. Taking root in the shallows of my heart, it is spreading slowing into my deep soul. What a curse!

I am too bitter to love. Love requires vulnerability, empathy, patience, and forgiveness. Bitterness obscures all of these things. Bitterness, although more subtle, is the same as blind rage. Bitterness, although opposite, is as powerful as blind passion. But all these things- these states of blindness- are death knells to love. They are weeping widows at the feet of lost love. They are the mess left behind when a lover moves out. They are the legacy of the lonely.

Last night I became a vicious cat. All my fur stood on end as I lashed out with sharp claws at someone I love. Where did the violence in my heart begin?

I am so calloused over by bitterness that my defenses are rigged with a hair-trigger now. At the slightest sign of retreat, I blast my lover with viciousness. I employ a scorched-earth policy now in my heart. One slight and I will obliterate your existence. The bitterness burns away all the beauty and joy of my love for you. It burns away all the hope and inspiration I found in you too. I burn away any recognition within my heart that I once dreamed of you, and then I turn away from the black and smoking remnants of our brief and budding love and march on...to the next disaster.

As the bitterness grows, I become more and more eager to burn. Each time it is less chilling to walk away from the destruction. I become more and more convinced of your culpability, and less attuned to my own. Bitterness also obscures the reality of my own crimes. Bitterness makes me feel strong and invincible, but only because it locks away my vulnerability.

The bitterness began with pain, of course. More pain made it stronger. Repeated heartbreaks made it more powerful. Slowly, my perception shifted; away from hope and optimism, and toward cynicism and anger. That was more painful even than the heartbreaks. Walking around angry all the time made the whole world vibrant with pain, and everything I touched seared me. So I had to become impenetrable. Bitterness encased me layer upon layer until I was able to touch, but no longer able to feel.

At some point, the anger died away. I remember a period of time when I couldn't stop laughing and the world felt entirely surreal. That time was eerie and alarming, but it felt like progress to let the anger go. I felt it drain out of my soul and I thought- " I'm ready for love." Then came another heartbreak, more pain. Such pain this last time! I knew I dare not touch anything around me. But eventually, I did try again and then I realized that it didn't really hurt. I was shrouded in bitterness and so I could go about my business without fear of vulnerability.

Now, I feel like I am waking up in a nightmare. My bitterness is a body cast and I am trapped inside. Lying prostrate in my lonely bed, I fear I have burned all the people who might have come to my aid. No one has been here to feed me in a long time now, and I feel the atrophy concealed inside the cast is too gruesome to bear. I am equally terrified of being left inside this grisly plaster tomb and of seeing it cut away to reveal my withered heart. I want somehow to free myself, but I think I am too weak now. I need help to cut away my own bitterness. I think I'll need a lot of help to love again.

Who will help me? How do I find them? How can I communicate my need? How can I build up my strength now, so that emerging from my cast of bitterness won't be so shocking? I don't know, I don't know. I am floating now in sadness, buoyed only by the bitterness that inspired it. This feels like an impossible trap. I think I'll need a lot of help to love again, and maybe a lot of time as well. 

Patience

The first day of July. Tonight I feel lonely again. It's been a few days now since I felt it this acutely, mostly because I've been keeping myself very busy. I know distraction is not an answer though, and soon I will have to face it more directly.

I want Romi, but it definitely doesn't feel right. He's such a child in so many ways. He also seems scared of me- intimidated most likely. I feel like I'm falling into old habits with my crush on him- tall, dark, man-child who will look at me as an idol instead of a partner. Finding myself here again, I have to ask: where did I go wrong with Colin? He still seems like the opposite of everything I naturally incline toward and therefore logically exactly what I need. But he doesn't need me in any way. He might like me, but he doesn't need me and maybe that is what I really crave. I want to be needed, like so many other women. I don't feel unique at all when I think of it that way. I guess I'm just another woman and he is just one more man like all the rest. But...

I'm so tired of looking for love! I'm ready, damnit! Universe, please send me someone to love! Yet, again tonight there is no one for me and so I must reluctantly conclude that I still have something to learn. Maybe the only real lesson left for me is patience. Maybe that's all there is for me now: the hardest lesson of all lies in the long wait for my turn at love.

I feel like I am losing my vitality (and my mind) in all this waiting. I feel I am growing lifeless and losing courage, will, and drive in the long, interminable wait. I fear I am losing my capacity to give love fully and also to receive or accept love from others. I am losing my ability to recognize the expression of love when I see it. How much longer can this wait go on??

I will walk to the ends of the earth for love. I will give up anything you ask of me. I will push through any challenge and defy any foe for the chance to really love again. Unfortunately, there is no path to tread, nothing to sacrifice, and no enemy at the gates. The only real obstacle is time, and the only action I can take now is to cultivate patience.

Please, just give me something to do! I beg you to let me battle my way to love. I grovel at your feet, Divine Mother, and ask you to send me to the front lines. Let me die in the passion and power of my crusade for love. Don't doom me to this miserable half-life, this purgatory of patience!

Where is my love tonight? Where is the phantom that menaces my heart? There is no face for me to dwell on, no sweet remembered kiss to conjure up as I touch myself in the darkness. Only the black, infinite void in which my love resides.

Of course I know that void is within my own heart, and the love I seek is there as well. I know how foolish, how pointless this fantasy of the phantom lover is. I know that love is not dependent on an object, or an image. Love is greater than such transient things as bodies or faces. Love is greater than a kiss, greater than touch, greater than the ache of separation or the joy of reunion. Greater still than trust, loyalty, fidelity. Far greater than my lifetime, far greater than time itself. I know that love is beyond all these things... and yet these are such beautiful ways to express it! In the end, as body-bound humans with such a short and limited existence, what more do we really have -or need- than the beautiful expression of love?

I think I am coming to understand that I can both know the infinite nature of love and find joy in the tangible, earthly expression of it. A joy that surpasses anything else I might ever encounter. A joy that both contains and transcends everything that makes me human. Knowing that love transcends attachment doesn't bar me from finding beauty, peace, understanding, and forgiveness in the expression of love that is engendered by mindful attachments to others. This kind of attachment, balanced with an understanding of the infinite nature of love, might more suitably be called CONNECTION. I don't want to shy away from connection anymore.

I'm ready for love. I'm ready to fully express my love to another limited being who can reciprocate to the best of their own abilities. I am ready for connection. I am even ready to be dissapointed or have my perspective drastically altered. I'm ready for anything, really, except this endless wait. The last lesson BEFORE I find love.

"Patience, darling, it will come", whispers the moon tonight.
"Patience, patience" sigh the clouds that obscure her milky face.
"Patience, patience, it will come", says the cold night air, pregnant with a stillborn summer.
"Patience, darling", sings my inhaled breath as it caresses my restless heart.
It will come. But when?