understanding rain

I knew you were out there, in the way I know there really is gold in them hills, the way I believe in the creatures of the world that I’ve never actually seen, though have never doubted.  I could feel you in me.  When I found you it was with a great sigh of relief.  But at the same time it was like this beautiful, captured, blocked energy inside myself had finally broken free, an explosion of realization, of connection, of love!  So before my sigh of relief, I was doing little dances, I was producing thrilled shrills, I was laughing from the heart and I felt jittery! Meeting you was like proving a point, or making contact with something I had been on a journey towards my whole life.  I settled into loving you like I’d always loved you.  And I had.  Supporting your dreams was like holding onto something when there was nothing to hang on to before.  It felt secure.  It felt so good.  With you, I felt like I had finally found something to hold on to.

What was it before you?  It was vintage suitcases.  It was bodies of water at dawn, migrating birds, dancing trees, it was hearing a knocking coming from a door inside myself and searching through endless mazes to find that door.  And it was dreams of you as an energy, a spirit… and dreams of my spirit swirling into yours like lucid ecstasy, like melting gold.  Yet you were never something I had preconceived notions about.  You were the notion, living and breathing and trekking along to form the idea.  And you did it perfectly.  Always.    Even when you irritated me, saddened me, tested me, hurt me, forgot me.  That’s all a part of it.  It keeps me alive to feel so much.  I couldn’t feel so much about anyone else. 

Your hands dance in my memory like music and light.  Your touch still gives me shivers, pleasure, warmth, even with you gone.  Your smile, my remembrance of it, still makes me smile and huff air through my nose in a half-laugh.   I can still see your face concentrating on music, as you go forward into the world with your talent, your dreams, your magic.  Even though I can’t see it, I know it is out there, your eyes squinted in concentration, your mouth pressed closed, hands always dancing…

You’re learning things, survival techniques, skills, talents, facts, statistics, realities.  I can feel you soaking it all up when I lie down to sleep at night, your energy still buzzing through me, still so much a part of me.  I feel your heart burst with excitement over these thousand miles.  I feel you orgasm under the heat and breath and touch of someone else.  I feel you shake when you’re cold, see the cloud of your breath in my own breath.  Sometimes even my movements are yours.  I find myself grabbing at things like you do, the ax, a spatula, a bottle of beer.  I expect to see your hands at the ends of my arms sometimes.

I can’t understand how you can want to not be with me.  Truly.  It seems like it defies the rules of the universe.  Like it goes against physics.  I stumble.  I trip.  I reach out and hold on to what’s left of you in me.  It withers more and more every day. This is not just some erratic obsession, some sick illusion.  This is just me in this world.  My heart doing what it does, my spirit crying like it cries.  I feel an ancient knowledge in this longing.  I feel a thousand years old with this deep missing of you.  I can see my ancestors buckling at their knees with the loss of love, their tears hitting dry dirt, their cries echoing off tree-lines, their white-knuckled fists clenching at clods of crumbling earth.  I feel connected to the big, long cry of everyone who has ever lost someone they love, going back to the beginning of time.  I see these feelings in layers hundreds of miles deep like the layers of rock historians study, but these are above ground, translucent, shimmering like so many tears.  The sedimentary layers of loss and love and heartache.  I am a thin green layer at the top of this enigmatic time line.