Six 02.18.10

There has been a fog for days now. It is shrouding everything in mystery and uncertainty. Obfuscating and obscuring everything in my path, it lends a palpable air of the unknown to everything it swirls about. This is a fitting reflection. This is a fitting reflection, indeed. The fog hangs suspended, but moves with a sentient quality I cannot explain. As I navigate about my days and nights it reflects the qualities of change - the ambiguity, the apprehension, and the feeling that everything is just nearly out of reach; Hovering outside my grasp until it is right and ready to appear. Suddenly trees unfurl themselves assertively from this phantom blanket of woolen fog. Figures blur, then emerge and retreat. I'm feeling a little like the hedgehog in the famous Russian animator Yuri Norstein's cartoon "The hedgehog and the fog." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRsXU4Q6a0Q)

My days are filled with a healthy mixture of the mundane and the exotic, traffic jams and plane crashes all. Everyday a new strange set of circumstances surrounds me. Signs from the divine to hold out hope come to me in undeniable declarations, I wonder if you are getting the messages too. I am observing the raw daunting novelty of everything. But still, I miss you. I wonder how you are, dancing, spinning out there in the fog? Sometimes I wonder how or why it is you have not contacted me. It's so fucking difficult for me not to contact you...SO ARDUOUS. But I try my best not to do it. I want to show you I can respect what you have requested. I can put your needs above my pain and selfish impulses. I can be strong and not crumble, not crack, not break down. I know I can't force you to love me, to trust me again, I must EARN those gifts back. I am committed to that task and however long it takes. Still, I am human. I wonder after you, care and concern are my cloak and cap. Are you alright? Are you happy? Are you feeling better? Are you healing? Questions fill my mind, questions that will not be answered soon. Questions that will be left to linger in the fog, dissipating as it burns off in the sunshine of untold days, weeks, months until we speak again.

I received the letter from your parents last night...it was so serendipitous. I was having a miserable night, the pain had surfaced again, despite my best efforts to quell it. And I had slipped into the comforting ebony envelope of exhaustion, I have to get my sleep where I can these days. My mother woke me, I don't know how long I had laid there in the dark breathing deeply in slumber, happy for the abyss it provided. There was food, she was trying to lure me with it. I started to rise, but not from my appetite motivating me, because I have no stomach for worldly things as of yet, but out of an earnest desire to keep moving. I was slow and clumsy with fatigue, fumbling out of the bed, until she mentioned the letter. MY eyes shot open, my body coiled like a spring, and I hung in suspended animation disbelieving what she had said. "What?!" I asked breathlessly, "from her???" My mother nodded with solemn mien and lead me out of my room. I rushed past the dinner I did not eat and found the letter in the kitchen. It was in your mother's scrawl, I recognized it instantly, the awkwardly curvy resemblance to your own.

Impatient, I tore it open, the dread and repose sliding all over me in the same moment. The card was a thing of beauty, a total benevolent act of assurance, that I am not sure I deserve. Her words of kindness and compassion soothed my ragged nerves and helped to put my broken heart into a state of further mend. It seemed to me at least, she was thankful for my presence too, that she was also rooting that we would return to each other someday. Despite her words of wanting to have me still reach out to them should I need it in the future, I was filled with a deep longing, a sadness I couldn't disregard. In that moment I knew, I had lost more than you, I had lost my second family. I am praying, praying, praying that we can all do our own self work and grow to come again together once more. I am praying for it with every piece of my soul.

I'm sorry if that makes me selfish. I think about our love and it's peerless. I think about how our love would be if we could both be healthy and have it reflect that mutual health and it's transcendent. Call me selfish then because I am now assiduously bound to my path of growth and healing. But with that in mind, I don't see any reason not to at least humor the possibility that in the future we could be together again. I am only wondering now, do you still feel the same?

So many times I want to contact you and ask you, "Can we just call this what it really is? a break? not a break up? Can't we just agree that we are both out here working weathering this absence, but that we want to return to each other?" But I won't ask you that, you'll have to tell me it, I can't ask you for fear of invading the space I am trying to give you, of wounding the trust I am trying to build by showing I heard you, I understood you, I love you, I am honoring you. But even if I have to wait to hear you say this for months or years I will. Because I am so firm, so resolute that you will return and I KNOW already I will be healthier when you do, because I am already walking my own path to individual health for me. I have my first consultation appointments scheduled with therapists next week. I have spoken with my parents to get them on board with my progress to make it lasting and beneficial for us all. I am joining the weight loss program tomorrow and I'm starting on a 3 month journey of self regeneration. I am working on my art work everyday again, and trying to get more and more advanced with my techniques. I am spending more time in the world, seeing friends, going places, because I was just so stagnant I let it get the better of me, and then I let it get the better of you too.

Please Sasha, please know I don't write these missives to hurt or manipulate you. I want you to know, it's only been a week, I know that...I know that change doesn't happen over night. I know that you have not had the time you need to answer all the questions you have. I know that a week, even though it feels like 50 years in the desert, is nothing. I cannot exhibit long lasting, beneficial, steady change to you in a mere week. But I hope that you can see that I am working on myself, for myself, and that this is the start of something new and wonderful for me. I hope you know that I love you still, so so much. And I hope that you know that while we are out in the fog, I am tending the home fires for your safe return. I am calling to you and hoping that what your mother wrote on the envelope for me is true:

"(S will contact you soon.)"