This, Too, Shall Pass

Someone I love very much called me in the middle of the night recently, to tell me goodbye. To tell living goodbye.

The conversation, which was filled with despair and the desire to "go to sleep and never wake up", was really a searching for a reason to continue, and a reaching for love in tangible form. This was a heart at the bottom, thinking it had lost everything and everyone.

Hearing that kind of pain is like sitting in an acid bath. Tears pour out; I'm thinking no no no, while understanding on some level that suicide is as valid an option as anything else.

Protests that the world is still beautiful and life worth living can't reach a mind in that state. I want to explain that Life has indeed yanked the rug out from under a bunch of illusions, and right in this moment is urging the ultimate letting-go--not into physical death, but into what is real, living and breathing and holding you.

Incarcerated in a wounded mind, there is no proof.

Fear holds up shining examples of just the opposite--hate, rage, injustice, addiction, poverty, struggle. Weariness says that this will continue, long into a future with death at the end. So what's the point? I'm tired, I just can't do this anymore.

I'm not there to hold you in my arms, so I hug myself. I say I love you. I love you. Listen to me! I love you.

It's all I have to offer. I don't know what else to say.


As I write this, there has been no self-murder. Of course, I am relieved. But I grieve as if the alternate reality stepped in, as if I'm preparing for a funeral, because I can't offer proof in a bottle, in a safety-net, in predictability or power. All I can give is myself, someone who dissolved and lived to tell about it.

I sit on the porch and let the sun warm my back while I cry. I put my head on my knees and feel my body blown wide open, for the closing of my eyes, for all the sounds coming out as birds and wind-chimes, the noon siren at the fire station, the leaves falling, pain collapsing into love.

I think about you as a baby, as a child, admonishing your friends not to hurt bugs or plants because they have feelings. I keep all the veils down so I can stay clear and clean, and let you run through me like a river, from the source to the source.

I know it hurts...but stay with it, stay with me. I love you.