To The Man I Have Loved:
Maybe I should not write this down for publication; maybe I should take a nap or a run or a breather instead. Maybe I should not meditate on the transcendence of your beauty or the depth of your pain, the breadth of your self-knowledge or the ocean that is and always has been your suffering.
Maybe I should not let some very small sliver of the internet know that your departure was my unraveling, your return my undoing, your love my salvation and your turn from that love, your reluctance to embrace it, your unwillingness to let it carry you my heartbreak. Ultimately, though, I am angry at myself. Angry at my choices. For loving a man who claimed he’d honor that love, but chose instead to cast those offerings upon an endless sea. For choosing to invest my heart in a situation that was barren, in a man who was absent, in a heart that claimed me but would never hold mine.
I could blame you, for your selfishness, while exculpating myself; hold you in a kind of contempt because you knew that your love for me was not enough, but implied otherwise; despise you for the power that you wielded. You knew what that meant, and you used it anyway.
If I could have apprehended all that was before us, everything that would come between us, or that the bonds we thought inextricable would be stolen out from under us us, I might have done things differently. I might have removed myself from you earlier, to spare my heart from pain, or stuck around but hardened my heart in ways large and small, in a final act of self-preservation. Or maybe I would have thrown myself into your arms more deeply, aware that since the fact of heartbreak was inevitable, not a likelihood but an eventuality, I should have beckoned it, instead of tensing myself against its impact, which only ensured a sort of emotional whiplash.
I was not ready when you left, almost a year ago, nor when you returned in the midst of this most recent winter. I was not ready when you told me that you love me like you’ve never loved anyone, but that however great and wondrous, our love was not enough. What does that even mean? I wondered, How can you quantify? I was not ready for your answer, that you didn’t know, nor was I ready to hear what came next: if I could fix it, don’t you think I’d change it?
Even in that moment, I could see: we were still creating our own space; it was a space of love, however limited or partial. It was real, but it was fragile. Your mouth said when we are together, it is like the world does not exist, but your eyes told me you were not ready to change. It was then that I understood: although you loved me, you would always choose something else, someone else: the world. It wasn’t easy, but then, what it? It was something braver than love, something even closer to the truth. I wasn’t ready then, either. But I am now.
Nobody Fs with the Bird 