It seems like I’m always writing about the complications of human connections, and maybe that’s not so strange. Maybe the topic deserves the examination I give it, heavy and central as it is to existence. I constantly fear that my ability to engage in authentic, healthy relationships with people is stunted and broken beyond repair, so it follows that the capacity of relationships themselves would occupy my head space as it does.
I awake everyday and complete the requisite steps of a successful life, measured out in coffee spoons, and feel vaguely like pieces are missing, as pieces are missing from everyone’s life. I long to be kind and uncomplicated and untarnished by the weight of time, but mostly when I look in the mirror I see someone over whom sadness has triumphed. Sometimes I think maybe this kind of life, this person, is the only person I could have ever really been good at being and other times it seems like I’ve just given up. I know I was made for more than the life I’m living and I reconcile that reality in small ways as best I can. My turmoil is mostly standard.
I come across things sometimes that illuminate in new ways the burden I force myself to bear, the battle between sincere and deep longings and the cancerous habits I cling to.
What great gravity is this that drew my soul toward yours? You have slid up to the person I wanted to be, the person I pretended to be. Should I show you who I am we may crumble.
I want to known and loved anyways. I trust by your easy breathing that you are human like me, that you are fallen like me, that you are lonely like me. What is this great gravity that pulls us toward each other? Why do we not connect?
I will discover what I can discover of you, and though you remain a mystery, what I find I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart.
I wonder sometimes if this is all we can really hope for, that there’s nothing to do except give ourselves to each other, then do the same thing tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after, though we never seem to get what we need in doing so. Or what we think we need at any rate.
Giving without getting is a revolutionary idea. I’m not sure I know how to do it. But sometimes I feel like it’s the way things are meant to be. All I can do is hope that’s true.
