Softening Guilt
I caught myself laughing today.
Not to make a show for the room,
rather because it felt okay.
But it sat strange in my mouth,
like the name I used to say all the time
that no longer belongs in a sentence the way it used to.
I thought of you.
But there wasn't a devastating pull.
I thought without the ache that used to live somewhere in my heart,
where I'd press my hand just to make sure something was still there.
I just thought of you.
Like I think about the restaurant I loved before it quietly closed,
and nobody made an announcement about it. It was just gone one day,
and I passed it for months before I stopped expecting the lights to be on.
I must have said I loved you over a hundred times.
On the bedroom floor with my back pressed agains the carpet.
In the car with the windows rolled down and the music too loud to talk over,
but I said it anyway.
I even wrote it once in a letter I kept
without the chance to hand to you.
I meant it every single time.
Every time.
And then you left pieces of me behind,
like you didn't notice they'd fallen.
A trail of small and quiet things
that I spent a long time on my knees gathering,
swatting away at everything that came to pick at them
before I could get there first.
But even with the pieces back in my hands,
I couldn't fit them together the way they were before.
And healing,
when it finally started,
felt almost like a betrayal.
Like putting down a weight I had decided meant something.
Like if I stopped hurting,
I was letting go of proof that what happened actually happened.
Now someone is gentle with me
and I don't know what to do with my hands.
There's an ease in my chest but I keep pressing at it,
suspiciously,
as if it were ice at the edge of a frozen lake.
Testing it before I trust it with my full weight.
It holds.
I step back anyway.
It isn't that I've stopped caring for you.
It's that caring for you now looks like letting it be over,
and I don't know how to do that
without feeling like a liar for all the times I looked right at you
and said I love you and meant it.
But I've been thinking lately
that the truest thing about love might be
that you can mean it completely and still survive without it.
That the words don't become untrue just because I no longer say your name.
That I am allowed to carry you gently
and still put my whole weight on the ice.
Still reach for something that doesn't cost me every quiet thing I spent so long stitching back.
The guilt is love that hasn't been told that it's been relieved of its duty.
- Nevie Jay
For those who felt that healing and moving on was wrong...