I don't think I can live with you anymore

I have to come to terms with what I actually want.

I want you. I want the you that loves me and is committed to me. But I also know that throughout these nine years you have never been able to commit to me the way that I want you to. You have never been able to fence us up and protect us even in hours where everything is a mess.

Those times, those dark moments, all you do is run away until you think I have cleared up the emotional debris and can pretend nothing has happened.

I have them, these suitcases, stowed away in the attic of the house that is us. They gather little dust because from time to time, you drag them out again and disappear.

So I am told, I cannot change you. I cannot. I should stop trying and just accept that this is who you are.

If that is the case, I don't think I can live with you anymore. Not because I don't love you. But perhaps because I love myself more and want what I want first, and more than I want you.

When You Stopped Loving Me

When did you stop loving me?

I suppose I should stop asking.

It is obvious to me that you have repeatedly cheated on me emotionally. The running away to other women, single, available women who at least in your head feed a deep-buried fantasy that you are still attractive when you think I no longer love you.

The thing is, I know why you do it. You maybe do it not because you no longer love me, but because you feel you need to run away and that is your way of making your self feel stronger and more attractive and powerful.

Does it, in your head, negate me, or diffuse my power?

You Liar

I realise now how much I actually love you.

That even in the face of your betrayal a part of me, the heart of me, still wants this to work, even though every other part of me knows I should walk away. Because you have lied to me. Because you have lied to me so indecently even as I, the person you supposedly love, have been in need.

Again, you have put your blind fear first before us.

I want this cycle of fear to end for you, for us.

Yet I don't know if you can do it.

I want to say goodbye, but a part of me is still torn apart by the memory of your softness, your love, your gentility.

Yet, my head wonders how you could have really loved me when you so lied to me so blatantly. Despite my crying. Despite my clearly being at my wits' end.

I guess perhaps, this is my lesson, my path to walk. To learn how love can overcome rage. How it can make even what you have done something that I can distance myself from and not let it shake my self worth.

I see now how I can be blinded. After talking to your mother I realised, she is not my enemy. She is instead like any other mother, limited by her own flaws and unresolved issues, her baggage and her hopes for her own children. Her belief that her children are good and kind people who were raised to be considerate, to be self-sufficient in this world.

She too, like me, feels isolated from you. Cut off. Banished into the darkness.

I too, like her, cling to you in fear that you will otherwise float away or drift, unmoored.

We are alike in our love for you, I recognise that now.

She does not stand between us. You do.

I keep asking myself to be more mature, to try and see my own fault in this plot. My flaws.

But all I keep seeing is that perhaps I have been in love with the idea of you, the possibility of you that exists in parts through your gentleness that I wish would balloon out and inflate your whole.

And loving an idea is not how you build a real partnership.

Loving a real person is.

So perhaps that is where my fault lies.

The Light In My life

Increasingly, as I gravitate towards those like me, I discover that they too love someone like you.

Perhaps because we all seek a betterment of ourselves. Someone to fill the gaps and smooth over our rough edges.

You are the light in my life although you do not know it. All the pushing I do, all the relentless nudges, in my mind, I do it for you. I do it because I guess I want to make you a better you.

But the question I now ask myself is - who am I really doing it for? Me?

I want you to be free. Free of the old, heavy suitcases of emotional baggage that you have carried for so long they are now ragged at the seams from being dragged in the dust. I see them trailing their heavy paths behind you. They leave a wider welt than your own gentle footsteps do. They obliterate what you leave behind when you pass by.

And I feel an incredible sadness. A harrowing sense of pain because I think I know the joy of being free. It is stupendous and addictive. It feels like everything and nothing at the same time. Bliss is a state I am in because you are in my life.

It makes me so incredibly sad that you are not the same way too, and because I love you, I guess I desire so strongly to help you get there too.

But I also realise you have to get there in your own time.

The thing I struggle with the most is what that is. That measure of time that it will take for you to find your self and your joy. And I am terrorized by the thought that you may never get there before you depart this earth.

Because the gift you carry within, of this supreme gentleness and kindness is such a precious and rare one.

You are the light in my life because you are gentle and kind and loving and unwavering in your affection. But when I sometimes hold the mirror to your face, all you see is blackness.

I think I have now reached a point in the path to your soul where I can no longer find a way through. And I am lost, for all I long is to reach you in the center of it all.

I guess I have to learn to let you be. Except I would be sad if you misconstrued me as not caring or loving you less.

If anything, I think, in my heart, I actually love you more now. I love you enough to stop knocking at your door. I will just sit here and wait. And if I grow weary of waiting, I will carry your light in my heart and walk away, always one eye to that brambled path, in the hopes that some day I will see you emerge from it whole.

At least, I know that I do this with only the best intent. I may regret it if something untoward happens to you, but right now, at this moment, what I do is with my best intent.

So I am asking you to leave my side, so you may wander far and stray, to find your self.

If you come back to me, I will be blessed. But even if you don't, I know that I have been blessed already with nine years of your loving presence.

Your Mother

I know mothers are precious and sacred. I have one myself. I love her, but I allow myself to love her whole, with all her flaws. And I have learned over time, perhaps imperfectly, to accept what I cannot change about her.

I know I am not the model daughter, least of all in your eyes. You were brought up differently.

But I fear you will never see what your mother does to you. Not just you but all of you, your sisters, your father. Every family is imperfect, and I wish you would see that yours is no exception.

Your mother holds all of you close. So close she inserts herself into your lives. Yours and your brother's are the only ones she hasn't been able to get into because you choose to stay away. So she insidiously attempts to tell you to marry, using all sorts of excuses that disregard your happiness.

If she didn't have her own motives, she wouldn't pester you so. Because she should be able to see that you are who you are.

Or perhaps, maybe she sees the same deep unhappiness you carry buried within you. It manifests itself in the way you live your life, aimless and without purpose.

So she binds you to this earth the only way she knows how. By calling on you, needing you, clinging to your trouser leg each time she feels you are floating away.

Maybe I do the same.

We both love you, your mother and I. Maybe we both love you too much.

Love

I don't know what has come over me, but I think this time I am just tired, even of myself.

As much as I cannot let you go, as much as I love you and want you by my side for the rest of my life, I think I can no longer accept this diminishing version of you that grows dimmer by the day.

I thought I was making things up in my head. I thought that maybe, maybe there was a part of me that suddenly desired more from you. But then, packing your things and running across old cards or photographs, I see that what I want is for the person I fell in love with to be fulfilled.

You were so hopeful then. You had dreams. You had purpose and you understood that real life requires money and work and thinking of the one you love as you go through the day.

It has been so long since I have received a random card or text from you just because. You used to do all that. You used to think of me.

Now I feel I am just someone you share a space with. A convenience who makes your not living easy, who pays the bills, who gives you a nice roof over your head, a place for you to run away from your mother.

If it is to her you want to return, them I am letting you go. Because there are only two things that can happen. Either you discover you don't really love me, or you do.

And I am now willing to take that chance. Because I feel I deserve to know once and for all.

And I love you too much to carry on supporting you, being your crutch and making it easy for you to run and hide from the baggage you carry. I let you ignore it in my arms. And I think I am to blame.

I am sorry I have failed you. I am sorry I have no more strength left to carry on and find new ways to make you understand and see what a wonderful, amazing, loving person you are. Someone who deserves to believe in the everlasting love from someone else. Not someone who only deserves to be tolerated.

I love you and even if you walk away from me, from this, from us, a part of me always will.

The Couple Who Is In Love

It is not that I don't love you. I can't explain why I do, but I do.

Maybe it is age and me not willing to go it alone because it all then become too difficult, too complicated. I have settled into a life. It isn't an unhappy life but it also isn't, at times, the life of The Couple Who Are In Love. But I just read a book where even that couple falls out of it.

Is it really possible, this kind of loving that lasts ages and has you kissing, having passionate sex on a weeknight even after years of knowing and the ability to draw your other half's silhouette with yours eyes closed?

I still find you attractive, but sometimes the thought of us having sex repulses me. Not because you are not desirable, but perhaps because we have become too familiar that to give in to an impulse so base almost tarnishes the whole thing.

Weird.

I want to be one half of this passionate couple that is beautiful and wrapped around each other. The couple that sits in a swing, limbs entwined, reading books, fingers absently caressing one another in places that are almost too intimate to be viewed in public.

I wonder whether those stay together long enough. Or can endure the normalcy of buying groceries, replacing fuses and drooping curtain rails. Bathing dogs. Folding laundry.

There are many moments when I feel fortunate. But I wonder sometimes if people ever see that glow of love I see in some other couples.

Bells

I hear bells. The kind that only ring an alarming tune. The sound is faint at the moment, as if wafting across hills, from a place I cannot see.

But I hear them.

I know you. You keep your feelings buried deep, unconsciously, not from malice or secretiveness. You are probably so covert with them you hide them from your self.

I can count the number of times the one I love has made me suspicious and I have always been uncannily right. Always.

I wish I have been wrong before, but I have not. So there it is.

I hear them pealing.

I have told you and you have been warned. Either pack your bags, for they will take long to fill, or sit quietly at home and don't pick up the phone.

Finisterre

Sometimes, especially at times like this, I wonder whether we reached this desolate place a long time ago and just refused to admit it. Or rather I came to the end of the road and chose not to face the unending sea stretching out to the horizon, the road long gone beneath the waves.

It puzzles me, truly, how someone like you who is so fortunate and lucky can afford to give up so much. You have a university degree. You have lived halfway across the world. And I suspect because you have actually had things easy, never had to starve or feel truly at a loss, because you have always been fortunate like that to have women who take you under your wing, you have forgotten how to live.

You spend your days, most days, slaying monsters on your computer screen. They're not even new monsters. They're old ones that you've slain a thousand times before.

You surf the net looking for the next get-rich-quick scheme that isn't a scam as if it exists.

You clam up when a problem in the real world occurs. You refuse to play ball. You don't want to face the fact that you're over forty and in real terms flat broke with no real asset to your name except your car.

And you have a university degree. And every reason to succeed in this country.

Maybe you live in Finisterre. Maybe that's where you belong.

But I don't.

Even on its shores, the shores of your end of the world, I am still gazing out to sea, wondering what it will take to build a boat, so I can sail to the horizon and discover what is on the other side.

Maybe that, is the difference.

My Old Ex-Friend

You and I know one another so well we are almost like mirrors when together.  Except because of history, we tend to show each other her ugly side.

You have forgotten how to be my friend on most days.  There are momentary glimpses of recollection, when you suddenly decide to ring me and ask me over because a special dish is being served at your table.  But most times, those incidental, easily forgotten instances in between birthdays, Christmases and deaths, you no longer remember.

I thought it was just me at first until I realised that you have been doing this a lot of late.  And by that I mean the last few years.  I am not the only old friend you have chosen to keep in storage, drawn out only on special occasions.

You choose instead to flit from one new acquaintance to another, treating them like they have been there all along and understand you and your history.  They don't.  And that's the truth.

Because no matter how hard they try, they don't know what it was like watching a part of you curl up in a ball deep inside your being in retreat and grief, daring to rear its head only around Christmas.  They don't know what it was like to understand your fear of failing when it seemed as if you were.  

But then it would seem you have also forgotten what that felt like.  You hold your head high now.  You don't remember the days when you barely had enough to pay for your next meal.  Or maybe you do, but you choose not to treat it with respect, and instead run away from it in fear of it infecting your future.

The only problem is, it's already there.

The Great Pretender

I have been trying very hard to figure out why I am so downright angry with you, because in the first place, it seems like such as waste of time.

After all, you were rude to someone I love who didn't deserve your outburst.  And you were inconsiderate to a child who didn't know any better.  All because you were stone drunk the night before and didn't go to sleep at a time people normally do - even when on vacation.

I think my anger is in the way you posture and pretend.  The way you insidiously mask your social climbing tendencies with a veneer of do-gooder-ness people fall for within the first ten seconds.  Oh self-sacrificing you.  Oh you unselfish cow.

But I see you.  I see who you really are.  A girl from a poor background who still carries a huge chip on her shoulder and has a point to prove even to those uninterested.  You're a typical social climber, one who will use others' shoulders as ladders, but with enough brains to remember your please and thank yous so most people don't notice your shoeprint on their shirt collars.  All they are left with is a dull ache that bears the imprint of your foot but no clear memory of the moment when the pain would have inserted itself into the shoulder blade.

Slowly, as things unravel, you will find that people are transient in your life.  Because that is the nature of what you breed.  Long-term relations with you are unprofitable for any soul because you choose to dictate the terms of engagement.

You will be alone at some point.  With nothing but your godforsaken cats and dogs.