Another last day of February, and with March comes thoughts of my mother, because shamrocks; but of course, then Valentines Day brings her too. (Aren’t shamrocks made of hearts!)
When Casey fell in love with me, I was as I am now. This is who I am, I said. My heart has been broken. I have already loved deeply and lost tragically. I don’t want marriage. I am afraid of surrender. I am on guard. Always.
That seemed okay for him.
“I’m lucky,” I wrote at the end of our first month together, the very first words I wrote to him in a card.
And then I added: “You’re lucky too.”
Maybe he lacked higher expectations. Maybe I did.
Or maybe what we had in common was our sense of Love as something higher.
We had two boys by the time we came upon this tune. It was winter. It was dark. There was darkness inside and between us.
Her. Voice.
The way she says: Pain. Tears. Heart. Met ours. Even our boys wanted to listen again and again.
The forgetting is the hardest part except that in the forgetting we don’t know what we forgot.
The forgetting makes it hurt less. Helps us surrender into day to day life without the extremes of love, promise, passion, wildness, hurt.
But what about these tears? A piece of good music. A painting. A play. A film. A passage. The light. The silence. A certain smile. Even the air.
There must be, beneath memory, beneath thought, beneath recognition even, a deeper current of being, reminding us of what we once knew.
The moment beckons, but we turn away, anesthetized from what it is to be whole.
~
Or maybe that’s too high an expectation.
Maybe showing for these moments is what is most true.
The Marriage Journey 