There was something so ominous in the air; even the hair on my arm stood up. Unnaturally I languished for a huge swallow of high value tawny whiskey in a short glass at room temperature and a bar stool with music as part of the ambiance. Something decades earlier in my unsophisticated thinking might have considered, yet I ignored that urge and moved onward. Having quickly deduced it wouldn’t really have that unrefined placebo effect these days not to mention, I didn’t have any.

A few steps into the our bedroom suddenly felt unwelcoming in the moment I found her sitting on the bed, drinking with her head turned away as if she was angry- again. Smoke from her burning cigarette was filling the room heightened the suspense enough to stop me in my tracks. Before I could ask what was going on, her erratic sounds muffled in a broken voice of words as her bloodshot glossy eyes caught my attention. Maybe instinctively they tried to lessened the message I was receiving as my own eyes grew heavy and looked downwardly as if I was just yoked with an overbearing burden. My thoughts were over taken by the resounding pounding of my heart as it thumped faster the more she informed me of her unsavory cheating guilt and ongoing hidden addiction. I’d forgotten what round it was for us on the drug and alcohol issue but the cheating was the most painful. I recall catching myself; pretending to seem astute to all she was saying as I looked through blurring eyes at who resembled my heart unequivocally loved- her. Maybe I was having an out of body experience or it was a failed attempt to retreat to a place I couldn’t find within myself.

Time flew by instantly but in a backwards cacophony of moments, places, events and conversations where my unquestioning trust epitomized what naive love really means and looks like; from a hindsight point of view, where my preferred bias ran interference to what should’ve been obvious back then. I loved her too much to hate her and yet hate was trying to consume me, take control anyways, so I turned it inwardly somehow. I was confused as to who to blame knowing I would accept a portion, but how much? Perhaps it was a last ditch effort to make it seem like the selfless thing to do. I tried vainly to quickly absorb its dark pain as fast as I could, rise above it all as if I was unscathed by it. Hours became days that became lost time in a subsistence realm. So much so I couldn’t see I had become anchored to it all. Little did I realize it was taking me deeper into a more profound vortex sense of uncharted ugliness. Polluting rhyme and reason so as to make my life an out of sync reality, further and further from my cognitive grasp until I was abandoned alone on an island of a new aberrational sense of normalcy. The emotional pain and truth didn’t get worse nor better, so I clung to it, fearfully- like a life preserver. I suppose in many ways it was at the time.

After all this time I’m still unlearned which was worse; the gut wrenching truth or inhuman lies being uttered from those lips that permitted me to believe I could degust bliss from them like an unearned gift. This is what happens when you love, I mean really love someone wholesomely with all your heart and soul. It unmistakably feels polemic to anything resembling the nature of love. Such a love doesn’t selfishly discard any further pain by parachuting from the relationship because fear shouts the plane is going down and now its every heart for themselves; at least not in my little bubble. I suspect its why most people couldn’t begin to even fathom the thought of allowing themselves to dare such an authentic venture into real vulnerability. To risk loosing even yourself through the heart and care of another is logically preposterous, unless you honestly intend for it to last forever, and all without the social safety net of some prenuptial agreement to pretentiously save you from…a haunted heart.

Poet of the Light © 2019