Sitting on the toilet to write. Excavating the cave from both ends. You don’t have to see one result, but…

So gross.

Ear pounding, not with pain, but pressure.

Do I have a tumor?

Is this it? Sometimes I feel lucky if it is, to be clear about my own death, to know it’s coming, to embrace the surety to be released from the fatigue and the heartbreak.

I can’t even write what I feel. I’m like Pleiades, I know I’m there but when I look at myself I disappear. And he sleeps, next to me and huge. How did he get so big, his feet, my god. But something isn’t right, it was never meant to be just me and him. It was always the three of us. Always the three. If I wasn’t so despondent I would curse god and throw tantrums and hunt for him to punch him in the face and beat him bloody. How could he?

How could he take such love.
How could he prohibit such care.
How could he turn his back on all that goodness?

And how could he put that young child into a situation where he experiences a more devasting loss, how could he throw two losses like this, how could he allow these two losses on this innocent soul.

What kind of god
what kind of world

A brutal god.
A brutal world.

And I know this anyway. Only that it’s never touched me. So now it’s touched me and now I cannot deny or hide from the brutality of the ripping loss. And there lies the hope, and how fucked up is that. That all hope should lie inside the brutality of ripping loss.

The hope for what, I ask.

The hope to love more fully. The hope to steer away from the brutality, for there is already plenty of brutality in the world without adding to it. And I don’t mean brutality that are things that leave you hurting or weak or vulnerable, I mean the brutality of the death of innocence, I mean the ripping, ultimate terror that separates one soul, one dream, one life, from the souls and dreams and lives it was connected to.

How could this happen to me, I lament and suffer. And deservedly so. How could this happen. Where is god in this…where is god-ness?

And then I suppose to ask more questions. As I always fucking do. I can’t help myself. I am a seeker of truth, Veritas Vincit, Truth Conquers, and I ask more questions because nothing is static and How Could this Happen only leads to a search for the answers and for what is below and beyond the grief and not just the grief, but the decimation of a certain soul. Make no mistake, it is a total annihilation of my life but it is not an annihilation of life itself. And so, then, what remains.

What Remains
Surety should be in short supply
But it isn’t.
And everyone is wrong.

Those untouched by ripping loss
cannot understand
In the same way
those without children
cannot understand.

But those with children
Cannot understand
without the ripping loss.

What remains.

I have searched, it is my nature
I am a nomad of the soul
with a kind heart
and no patience.

And what I have found
Is not what I thought I would find
It is not what I wanted to find
In fact,
I had thought that I had given up
the search.

But you cannot give up your nature.

And so, in spite of my mis perceptions
I have continued the search
like a computer defragging
while going about it’s normal process

Grinding away underneath
human scales wailing and screaming
in silence and disgust.

Leave Me Alone, my disgust shouts.
My sadness and terror at the pure
horror of the world.

Leave Me Alone!

But of course
And because
It is my nature.
I cannot leave myself alone.

And so grinding, grinding, grinding I go
at the question…

What remains?

I remain.
You remain.
And so the hope of love remains.
But only as a hope.
But always as a hope.

Only and Always.

We must rely on neither.
It is in the reliance of either
That both cease to exist,
That love ceases to exist.

So, what, then, remains?

I remain.
You remain.

Not ideas.
Not theory.
Not anger.
Not jealousy.
Not pain.
Not fear.
Not education.
Not belief.
Not politics.
Not pleasure.

You remain.
I remain.

And how we treat each other is whether or not we show love.
How we treat each other is all we have because it is only us.

Anything around us that is not in the service of encouraging
our connection to each other
Anything not in the service of encouraging our connection, is erasing the map.

And when we become lost we lose all that we love and have loved.

And I understand that sometimes being lost feels better than love.
And it’s ok.
It’s ok to feel better.

But it’s better to feel love.

Is this what remains?