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By coujeaux Date: 2002 Nov 21 Comment on this Work [[2002.11.21.21.53.9146]] |
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I know the sting of external surrender all too well-it has, throughout my reasonably young yet whirlwind life, been a constant I've accepted as necessity. When I speak of "external" I mean letting go of people in my life that were either impossible to hold on to or were designated by their actions or decisions, or my own, as being a required subtraction. Lovers are a prime example of this law of living for me, but there have been a number of friends and even one notable member of my immediate family that were erased from my presence as if I had carved a wart off the bottom of my foot with a straight razor. I find such actions distasteful yet recurrently necessary, and I have a healthy disdain for the practice unless I see it as a viable alternative to continual betrayal or willful disappointment on the part of those I know. I cover this topic today because I read something last night that struck me in a familiar way: A young lady was grappling with mixed signals from her beau as to the future of their relationship, and she sensed the gate was being retracted on her, exposing the moat below. Do you dare attempt to scale the wall of the fortress, knowing the teeth of the crocodiles below? Or are you fed up enough with their hall-of-mirrors diagramming of your future together, seeing many images of what could be the truth but never really sure of which likeness bears your beloved? These are difficult questions to answer, because you inject the variable of the human heart and intertwine the ultimate incarnate wild card: decision. I reference Monica as my familiar in this case: We have grappled with our own copy of this conundrum since she and I parted ways, and while I will always love her as I do now, I have realized that we are probably done as lovers. So be it-I've crossed this Rubicon before, and I've no real fear that I will in proper time find someone else to lay down with in significance. But how do we walk away from something so powerfully satisfying and enervating as the thrill of being completely, hopelessly, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, hormonally, powerfullyand totally enamorado? (That's 'in love' in Spanish for all you gringeauxs out there.) Why should we have to set something so strong free because of the actions, decisions or frailties of other people? Do they have that right? Does ANYONE or ANYTHING have the right to take your heart away from you and walk to someone else with the piece of your love you gave them? Yes, they do, and that's probably the most difficult part of all of it. Everything ends, people, whether we wish it or not. Land shifts and gets consumed by the oceans over time. Buildings can be destroyed in the blink of an eye, along with anyone and anything inside of them. Look up at the skies and you might be privileged to see the utter obliteration of a star millions of light years away through the lens of a telescope, and would it enter your mind that countless eons before any of what we know was ever chronicled or recorded by mankind, perhaps a hundred billion beings were erased by that event? Perhaps they loved, regretted, detrtoyed themselves through warfare and hatred as we do. Perhaps they never believed they would be the same again after their better half left with a portion of them. And then everything they were got vaporized by what amounts to the cosmos shaving them off its foot with a hydrogen blowtorch a hundred million miles wide. What we lose teaches us appreciation for what we have or could have. Nature will destroy me eventually, and I cannot prevent this. But in the whisper of time I am granted, I can love Monica or someone after her again. And though time will draw my final breath from me against my will, it cannot incinerate my spirit, the souls I have touched or the sweet memories of her body, her heart and our fleeting time together. Your recollection and your ability to feel again after loss are the gifts of living and loving you always have, and no man or woman walking out a door can haul away the images of the good times. So, if you choose to do so, you can hold on, baby. But you have to know WHAT to retain and what to surrender. And only losing here and there teaches you what or who has earned the right to stay with you forever, or at least until the end of YOUR time. And when you consider that everything ends, it doesn't seem so bad after all, now does it? Nothing but the best. Read that phrase and understand how powerfully it guides my life, whatever that is worth. Blessings and thanks to all of you shining in the world tonight, and may the stars in your sky burn through tomorrow and all days forth. |