losing

Over here i keep mentioning that i've lost, which is really how i feel about life right now. daily i walk through the streets of new york feeling stripped and barren. or, like right now, i run back to connecticut to hide and take cover. even now, i am covered in blankets and quilts and the comfort of a little new england cottage sequestered in the woods.

in the morning, my mother and i sit in our back yard watching frogs jump in and out of our little pond, sipping our coffee, discussing the day that i'll get married on this little hill. there will be rose gold and pearls and a handful of people who have become a transplant family. it will be private because we are private. it will be simple because we are simple. there will be love.

this is a conversation i always have running through my mind. when i was young, i would walk through our corn fields and our garden trellis and sing a little wedding song to myself. i've never wanted to begin a new home away from this old one. i never believed there could be a greater accomplishment than to spend a life loving one man.

all of this now strikes me as odd. i have no pearls, and i have no love. in fact, at this exact time last year i gave them up and wept and wept and cried out to the L-RD, you are the greatest pearl, and then lived for twelve months giving to swine what he had already purchased.

that's too aloof. these conversations strike me as odd because i am so aware of my aloneness and vulnerability. since the spring, i have watched, one by one, things and people i care about go away. its loss -that's the only word for it.

i built a home in those californian hills. i carved out a life and a space and drove away from it all, promising myself that family matters and there was more of a life to live. the sweetest bearded man is gone. we didn't fight each other. he looked so tenderly at me and believed in me and said goodbye. i wonder what would happen if i had just turned around and come back and laid my body at the foot of his bed until LA was ours.

since new york, i sit quietly in my room feeling shaky, but not enough to weep. i was afraid of these streets for so long, afraid of traveling north along the east river. friends have left, jobs have left. some of them i kicked out, some of them chose it. either way they are gone. i am quiet about it - afraid to acknowledge that i miss them or long, unable to fight someone's decision or my own. the low tide is so strong, i put my trust in the gravity of the moon; i put my trust in the L-RD. i have to. i have nothing left to hold on to instead.

my insides are weak. my veins and my heart are drooping. i walk meekly, i bow my head. thinking that after all this loss, there must only be the prayer: i have so little, i need so much.

therefore i will block her path with thornbushes;
i will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.
she will look for them but not find them.
then she will say
'i will go back to my husband as at first,
for then i was better off than now.