“There isn’t time – so brief is life – for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. there is only time for loving – & but an instant, so to speak, for that. “
Mark Twain, in a letter to Clara Spaulding, 20 August 1886.
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us. […] Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
– When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron
“I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love. The only way that I can “handle” Grief, then, is the same way that I “handle” Love — by not “handling” it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
No Contact
It had been years.
Long years.
So I wont lie.
I swear,
in that final moment we shared:
I lived a thousand lives,
a hundred thousand,
a hundred, hundred thousand.
And there,
I knew all the faces and forms
of what our love could have been–
powerful love
whole love
infinite love.
But the moment ended
And the path was set
where I would not see you,
nor know our love
in any other shape but
sorrow
-Cpontrella 2017
“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?” – Jeanette Winterson
“I didn’t know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It’s huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it’s proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it’s for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?” – Jeanette Winterson
Our First Apartment
An iron-barred
plant-laden window,
guarded by the Buddha,
gating out the world.
Cold sunlight
on warm wooden floors
scratched up by a table
built for building a community
together.
Teacups.
Boardgames.
Blankets from your sister.
Books.
So many books
color coded and marked up,
separating you from me and here from
there
and
A couch you hated, and
the art.
Bay windows and
the bedroom walls
soaked with words
from whispered conversations
that drew us
deep
into the night and
into each other.
I didn’t realize it,
when we first moved in.
I swear,
It didn’t look like a battleground.
“Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with those who are reckless with yours.” – Mary Schmich
Philip Roth on the Danger of Love
“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.” The Dying Animal by Philip Roth