Patience

Today I want you to come back to me one day in the not-too-distant future, except happy and whole.

If it means you must go there, explore that newly cut trail that holds uncertainty as to where it will lead, then I guess I must let you go. Let you go in all thought, feeling and deed. I must stop.

I must stop trying to be there for you. Instead, I will just be. A figure in the periphery of your life, someone bright and shining, of whom you will always think of fondly as the one you should have loved for all time.

I must stop feeling anger for this woman who has caused me hours and days and weeks and months of pain and anguish. Because you are both weak and lost and confused. Because you are both unhappy. You are drawn to one another like hurt animals.

I know you. I know where you are. I must stop trying to help you out. I must let you do it in your own time and give you the space.

Perhaps I may discover I don't really love you after all. That I am in love with the possibility of you, and that this tarnished, deeply cracked you who stands before me today is never going to be whole.

Show me who you are once more.

Show me who you can be.

I will be here, waiting.

But in the meantime, I must bury all my love for you. Deep beneath the earth, where even roots of trees cannot find you, so that you will not hurt me anymore. I will relegate you to the lost pages of old journals that I have not and will not read for years and years to come. There, you will lie, until you come back to me whole.

I know that you still seek me out. That there is a part of you which loves me. Perhaps I think that it is impossible for you not to love me. That is a dangerous belief. I must let that go.

Because why wouldn't you want me over her? I am far more beautiful and of your world. Unlike this woman who doesn't even have a nice face to begin with, who looks as if she would just devour you whole with her clinginess and manipulation.

But I judge her.

I think, I should not give her so much power.

She is instead a weakling, a woman who cannot help herself. Who needs someone to cling to even if it is you in all your weakness.

Let her.

I will hold you instead with a fine, invisible thread that I hope will keep you tethered to me until the day you realise you don't need it anymore and only want to be in my arms, beside me.

Dear God, grant me the patience and the will to see this through.