mar

sometimes i think i am meant to bleed out in the snow. no warmth, no hands, no reason. just white silence and the body giving up. i tell myself i have to be okay with it either way. i try not to linger on what i can’t control.

so here i am, i guess. letting go. not abandoning the idea of love; just handing it back to the universe like something too heavy to keep holding. maybe i will be loved someday. maybe i will die alone. i think i have reached the point in my life where both feel survivable.

as if i am even ready for love at all. maybe the universe knows that. maybe that's why everything feels so still. i wouldn't know how to hold the very thing i ache for in my own shaking hands.

that's the devastating part: not that i don't have it, but that i might someday. that it could be real. because if it is, it only confirms the universe's cruelty: that i spent two decades consecrating my loneliness, making peace with the idea that i was meant to be alone forever, carrying the eternal wound of a mother and the voices that taught me this was my destiny. and it is only now (if ever) that i am deserving?

i don't know how to forgive the time it took to arrive here.

I'm so lonely, only ghosts hold my hand.

Photograph by Horst P. Horst, 1970.

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“As a poet – not as a citizen – there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. And that is particularly serious now. It’s being so quickly corrupted. Speech is the mother of thought, not the hand-maiden. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and that leads to violence. As a citizen obviously one has a host of political duties. The issues are too obvious to go into. But that’s as a citizen. My only duty as a poet is to defend the use of language."

--W.H. Auden, in a 1970 interview with Stacy Waddy for The Guardian.