An apology letter

I stretched your heart until the blood spilled over. I did it to fit him inside of you. I cared more for him to have a home of you than I did about breaking you open. And you did. Your lungs were drowning in blood. I saw you gasping for breath and did nothing. The blood seeped through you everywhere. Everywhere. And I took your bloodied fingers and wrote of him still. I wonder if he ever read that, if he ever cared about your fingers bleeding him words. But I never did; so why should he?

You made a nest of your frail body and flailing limbs. Sometimes I catch you clutching at the wounds I gave you. You’re trying to love yourself more than you love him, in hopes of having yourself back. But you fail.

Your body is now a crime scene. And when they wheel you away to cut you open, to study you, I know what they’ll find. More words inside of you than there are stars in the galaxy. And all your stars would have his name written on them still. They will collect those and put them in little plastic bags marked “evidence”.

Would they be surprised when those stars begin to revolve around him? Will they put him in handcuffs and demand he give you your words back?

You will stop them.

I stretched your heart until he fit there perfectly, until you no longer could.

This is my apology to you, dear me. I’m sorry.

I give you this word back though it was but one of the many exit wounds on you.

Letter to Luna

Dear Luna,

I should’ve written this earlier. Maybe today is a July evening. It should’ve been. But it’s December and the year is ending and I should’ve never waited this long.

You’re stardust. You’re the moonlight. You’re dusk. You’re the meeting point of light and dark. How do you do this? You’d think someone would be kind enough to ask for permission before gently ripping you apart at the seams. You never stop for permission. You just do.

Gently. 3 am. 2 pm. You do not care if I’m lonely in a blanket or busy with the day. Maybe I should shift the blame to your words. But you’re made of those. You’re made of your words. And sometimes, those words un-make me.

They barge right in. Unapologetic about how violent they are. They catch me unaware. They catch me vulnerable.

I’m vulnerable.

Maybe this is why I never wrote to you in July.

But here I am. And there you are, with your words.

Often, we collide.

Nothing good gets away

In a letter to his son, talking about falling in love, John Steinbeck closed the letter by saying, “And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away”.

A man has to know a love of this depth and magnitude to get away by talking about it in this way. He believed what he said because he already had it.

If there are a million ways to love someone and a million kinds of love, it must make that person that one rare person to have absolute faith in what he feels and what he’s made to feel by the one he loves.

It’s hard, almost impossible, for a cynic like me to take this piece of advice seriously.
Nothing good gets away. Really now? I thought good things don’t happen to people, that they need to be chased till we can’t breathe from the exhaustion and then we must, really, crawl on our knees until it’s in sight again and to hold it and if it can be helped, to keep it.

“Nothing good gets away.” The little part of my heart that that tricks me into believing stuff like that is rejoicing with hope. Perhaps, I should listen.