There is a misconception that if you are honest, if you share who you really are – people might not like you. The misconception is that you should care…honesty is the best way to find the people who will love you and weed out the people who will require you to lie about yourself in order for them to pretend to love you.
Be who you are. It attracts the kind of people who will really love you.
I know I have the capacity to heal you. I can see where all the holes are. You leak regret and discomfort from wounds that won’t heal. I’ve watched you tear them open just to see if they still exist, if they ever did, just to make sure you’re not crazy. You wonder why, on a day steeped in carefree indulgence, do you feel so uneasy, so broken all over again. But love is a landmine that is triggered by itself…even new love reminisces about the old. The one that both expanded your heart and tore it apart. The new love wreaks of putrid reminders even as your head is full of her perfume, your hands full of her body.
I know I could heal you. Slowly. Just like you need it. Sweet transitions with sweet nothings echoing in the hallway of her museum. You simply want to leave her behind. You offer your sins for redemption.
But I am always left wondering, who will save you from me?
We are just sleeping together.
We say.
This is just until the next best thing comes along.
We protest.
I love the feel of your skin.
He whispers.
But it’s the loudest thing I have ever heard.
It’s deafening.
It’s confusing.
It makes me feel.
I’m not ready for a relationship.
I decree.
That’s funny, he says, I was just thinking this is the best one I’ve ever been in. This non-relationship stuff is cool.
Which puts us in a relationship.
It might as well be a cage, for me.
Of course, now I have to leave.
The end.
Always the end.
I wrote this 3 years ago and decided it needed somewhere else to live besides my head…
It’s been one year. One Valentine’s Day away from the one you irrevocably tattooed on my soul – bringing flowers in, taking your suitcase out. There isn’t a hallmark card for this one. I’ve looked. I suppose it would look odd scattered amongst the hearts and sentiments of forever. The one lone card that says, “Sorry you’ll never, ever forget this day” – not because of love, but for the lack of it, the sheer invisibility of it. I guess it would be better banished to the sympathy section, except that I am too proud to even look there.
There is no forgetting.
First it was the poppies – those blood red reminders of abandonment in the first degree. I still carry one everyday to keep it from being so shocking when they do start showing up. Remembrance Day – remembrance of a man who could not even stay on this earth for me. In 15 years, that never feels softer. I still roll over on it like a boulder. There is no pea under this Princess’s mattress. I used to wait for a letter from my Dad after he died. I wished I could have been there to go through his things, to find something – anything – that indicated he loved me. Something that said he thought about it, hesitated in his death process when I came to mind. I wondered if someone threw it away or overlooked it. That maybe when they donated his clothes a stranger pulled a note out of one of his pockets that tenderly pointed to me as a reason to live after all. Like a message in a bottle, thrown out to sea so that someone, somewhere could acknowledge it.
And here I am, the foolish optimist, waiting now for your Valentine. An empty space waits beside my tattered poppy. Remember me. That is all I want. My foolish heart has let you go, stopped wondering, pining for you. My life is easier without you both – My Husband and my Father. I let the gift of your absence wash over me when I am not sure. Sometimes, there is no fixing it.
No, I don’t want you to fix it. The broken reminds me I am alive most of the time. We deadened in our companionship, walked past life. While things occasionally seem too loud or colors feel too bright, I am grateful for their pleas to see them. I am enticed more often by things that would have scared me. I am capable of so much more without our combined burden. I loved you because you tried to take care of me, tried to give me space to walk without the whole load all the time. But you were not the one. You could not stand the weight of it. And I could not stand to be without it. Some people, like animals are meant to be beasts of burden. Some are not.
I’ll admit the surprise still hits me sometimes when I think of it. Think of you. Truth be told, I thought you were a better person than me. I admired your morals and your logic to problems. I took a lot of stock in other’s accounts of your kindness and stability. People rarely surprise me but you did it twice in one lifetime. The surprise that you would even want to love me. And the surprise that you could unlove me just as easily. The latter left me with less kick back. It made the first surprise feel more authentic – as if I had a reason to be doubtful in the beginning. My intuition works. One day, I’m going to actually listen to that.
One day I’m going to forgive you. That is not today. Today, the best I can do is give you credit for trying to be a good man. This conflicts with the part of me that believes you tricked me knowingly with some hope that I would save you, that you would earn the moniker of a good man by accepting me in all my torn apart bits and pieces. I can see how the idea seemed absurdly logical to you back then. And I know you are desperately trying to get back to normal, to present as if you were never tainted. But you’ve always been tainted haven’t you? That’s how you found me. Some sweet sanctuary for some brief time. It must be so hard to pretend again. For that, I choose indifference for you instead of anger. Sometimes.
And I wish you knew that no one else but I could ever set you free. Funny, you have the exact same key.
Sweet, sweet Valentine. Where are you? Ruby red paper with a velvet finish, still wet from the ink of confession, of freedom. I think of all those cards you wrote me while you were already leaving. Somehow you were able to make me believe that despite the troubles, despite the distance – you loved me. Even when you didn’t any more. Maybe it’s a game, a silly trick of the brain – but I’m still waiting for that Valentine –the one that says I was worth those 5 years. My forgiveness eagerly checking the mailbox like all those years before with my Father. Your mistakes, your inflicted wounds, holding tightly to ego like a scared child. Funny how love can turn on you in the end. All those sweet nothings echoing into nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. 
I believe this. I believe every broken, razored piece of shrapnel we are given in life goes into a giant kaleidoscope, and people can choose to look through your soul and see those pieces dancing or tear you open and see the garbage of your life in its least magical form. Let the pieces of your life create something beautiful. ♡
Maybe no one has ever said it to me the right way.
I always thought it was the kind of thing that philosophers and people who committed their lives to God really understood.
I thought it was really just a question in one of those games that asks mind bending questions – you know, could you ever forgive someone who murdered someone you love? And we wrestle with it back and forth while we drink shots and say things like, “it depends who they killed”.
So trite. So silly.
I watched a video today of a man named Robert Rule who read his victim impact statement in court to the man who had pleaded guilty to murdering his daughter, Linda Rule. A man who in fact, had pleaded guilty to murdering 48 women. He was widely known as the Green River Killer. This may sound familiar to you since he was considered to be the biggest serial killer in US history, even though the court date took place back in 2003. Maybe I am just that behind the times that I am just seeing it now or that all these years later, it has found its way to me, but there it was just innocently asking to be watched. I clicked on it out of the strange curiosity that serial killers elicit. I had no idea what the link would leave me with. I expected to feel unsettled but I did not expect to be completely undone.
Robert Rule read his victim impact statement after a steady stream of angry and often violently spitting family members wished him a painful death and place in hell. It was short. His voice was steady if not a little hesitant, but there was no doubt he knew what he was going to say and he knew perhaps, it would change everything. He said:
“Mr. Ridgeway, there are people in this room who hate you. I’m not one of them. You have made if difficult to live up to what I believe and that is what God says to do and that’s to forgive. You are forgiven Sir,”
Read that again. You are forgiven Sir. The simplest words. The most incredible possibility realized. It made everything in my life seem so small. So petty. I have written about forgiveness before. My “demi-forgiveness” as I call it. The half ass way to say that I’m probably capable of being a decent person but it’s not my fault if I don’t succeed because somebody hurt me. The realization that someone could forgive the person who murdered his daughter and I was still holding a grudge against my ex husband whose sins were negligible…seemed unbelievable. I say it all the time – perspective is everything but I had never, ever, ever considered this perspective. I have never had to, save for a wayward game of “Would you Rather?”. I am struck by how difficult it is for me to watch that video without feeling overwhelmed by the act of his forgiveness – knowing nothing of him or his daughter or their lives. I felt relief too. I felt the weight slide off even my shoulders, the weight of the anger and pain and regret that he would carry otherwise. I felt an undefinable sense of grace unfolding, that thing that we all wish for and leave to beauty contestants to speak out loud – peace. Real, actual, unfettered peace. How do you, without years of practice and chanting and hiding far, far away from the world – how do offer forgiveness without retribution? Because we do that all the time, hold forgiveness at a cost, reap rewards for our platitudes. It is very rare to see forgiveness in its stripped down, bare existence where is does nothing for you but actually free you. But there it is…in a YouTube video from a court date in 2003. Just staring me in the face asking me who the hell did I think I was, losing sleep over the most benign of offences.
I want to tell you that I had an instant chain reaction of forgiveness. A stirring akin to Scrooge’s unlikely outpouring of Christmas spirit. But I didn’t. What I felt was shame. And Compunction. Possibly the exact opposite of forgiveness. What I felt was an instant replay of all the thing that I needed forgiveness for. The stupid and reactionary and selfish things I had done over the years. I started to second guess what and who I was forgiving. How do you compare your silly trifles with that? Who among us can offer such a gift so as to absolve even our own selves? I count my tributes to the Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandelas of the world. And yet, there is no monument, no following of Robert Rule. How troubling where we set our attentions to, that we have no mass affinity for a man that did what most of us will probably never have to do and could likely never abide by.
I’m humble as hell today. So much so that I decided to dedicate this year to forgiveness. Forgiveness to those who have wronged me. Forgiveness to myself. Forgiveness for all the times I will forget about this video and how it makes me feel right now. I’m leaving it here for all of us to come back to.
This little guy just got out of the hospital. The first thing his weak little body did is pull his favorite toy close and pass out by the fireplace. His certainty for what is important and cherished is the reason I feared his absence on this planet. It’s so easy to love that little being. It’s so easy to accept his unfailing love for me every single time I walk through the door (even if his bark could make your ears bleed). It’s the opposite of complicated. I feed him, I walk him, I scratch behind his ears once in awhile and he adores me. We have a practiced routine every morning where I do yoga and he crawls into every space he can – usually licking my face until I fall out of pose. He sleeps in my room every night (yep, on my bed…I’m that guy). He crawls onto my lap when I’m sad and catches every tear that rolls down my face like some weird game of Plinko. (If you aren’t old enough to recognize that…Google the old Price is Right) He just generally gets me. I understand this is no small feat for someone who is synonymous with complicated and yet yearns for his exact ability to make me feel anything but. Isn’t that what we all want? The opposite of complicated? How ironic that we need to learn the value of that from animals – who we consider less sophisticated than ourselves, who we would class as inferior. I know that I can’t keep this little furball of wisdom and compassion forever, but I am grateful to the powers that be that let me keep him for a little longer, while I learn the value of simplicity and loyalty. Just don’t get me started on the vet bill…though it made me unendingly grateful for universal health care in Canada. Excuse me while I go coddle the hell out of my dog – they made me go to work today without him. : )
I find I sometimes struggle to get connected to the message of Remembrance Day with my busy life and pampered every day existence. So every year I close my eyes and imagine what it would feel like to watch my oldest son walk into the face of a war, his still little boy face visible, his emerging bravado trying to anticipate what is to come with no context except the wrestling matches he has had with his younger brother. An ill fitting uniform on his lanky frame that still requires many more years to fill it in. I visualize this in my mind coupled with the uncertainty of his fate and the enormity of the sacrifice is swift and crushing.
Remembrance hardly seems to be enough and yet it is the gift we’ve all been given.
Remember.
I have hesitated to throw my hat in the ring in writing about Robin William’s death but the words have been burning me up in the last few days, tugging at my shirt hem, begging to be told. But to be more clear, it is actually Robin William’s daughter I want to write about. I was so moved by the words she released in the wake of her father’s death thinking how did she ever find the clarity that suicide so often steals? It was less of an envy and more of an awe that struck me as I read them…
“While I’ll never, ever understand how he could be loved so deeply and not find it in his heart to stay, there’s minor comfort in knowing our grief and loss, in some small way, is shared with millions.”
My words following my father’s death were far more clumsy, less sure of the reality of what had just happened to my family. But there was a similarity in our account of not understanding how someone we loved could choose to leave us. The legacy of suicide in a nutshell.
The tabloids roared, “Zelda forced from Twitter” and “Cyber bullying back in the news” but we know that all of these things have been around for a long time…I have yet to attend a suicide that didn’t force someone out of something – comfort zones, dreams, beloved roles, Suburbia, and on and on. Suicide is a death of a thousand people. No one truly makes it out alive all the way. Any survivor will tell you that parts of you die when you experience suicide. We were just simply not made to reconcile death as a choice. Our instinct is to survive, although given a moment to really ponder it, you will realize that suicide too is simply a way for someone to survive, particularly when the alternative is worse than death. Maybe you can’t know what that means right now but the reality is for some people, life is a very painful experience. Count yourself lucky if you don’t understand it. Most people don’t know this but someone wrote “murderer” across my garage door after my dad died. It was the olden days version of cyber bullying. This is a very high profile situation but go to any funeral home after a suicide, you’ll see all the same stuff happening. It makes sense, if people are unable to reconcile that suicide could be a choice to die, then there has to be a “reason” they choose to die. It levels out people’s anxiety if there is a black and white reason. I heard on the radio the other day that it was being rumoured that Robin Williams was having financial troubles – AHA! A reason! That makes more sense to people than someone wanting to die. Another good reason is some other person must have wronged him, missed the signs, failed at their protective job. If you can’t reconcile someone’s choice to die, then surely it would be easier to understand if there was some antithesis, some antagonist that caused the thoughts of death. It’s more logical. It fits better into the puzzle pieces of the world. But it’s wrong. And Zelda got that right away. My guess is she wasn’t so much as forced as making her own choice. She does not have to be a party to people’s ignorance. She did not write a rebuttal, she wrote a reckoning of what often characterizes those early days of death – I miss him, I don’t understand but here are some things I know for sure. She was righting herself, finding her feet in what will be a very difficult balancing act for many years to come. The exodus from nay-sayers is her survival. And a very graceful one at that. If there was anything I could say to Zelda, from one daughter to another, it would simply be this: No one asks to be a spokesperson for suicide. No one plays with Barbies when they are young and hopes they will be a great advocate for themselves and their loved ones in the wake of such a tragedy but yet here you are, forced out of Twitter and forced into the spotlight at a time when the light must be very bright and very cutting indeed. Even after 18 years past my own Father’s suicide, I feel it keenly, the heaviness that I would not wish on my worst enemy and I am grateful for the light you beam back to all of us, reminding us we did the best we could and have impacted at least those closest to us to learn a little something different about suicide and depression. I rest easy in the knowledge that anyone who knows me at all, knows the devastating impact suicide has, both by the death itself and the reactions that society at large has about it. One woman told me in her best intentions, that she did not believe my Dad would really go to hell because he killed himself. She meant it I believe, as a comfort. Maybe she kicked herself later for saying it. Maybe she patted herself on the back for bringing that to light. I will never know. It stuck with me for a long time though. It proved to me the power of words and I have tried my best not to throw them around carelessly ever since. But trust me when I tell you, I did not come to appreciate the “lesson” of it for many years.
So let’s take a page from Zelda and learn to be careful with our words. I love how she doesn’t let the negative people just get away by telling them:
“As for those who are sending negativity, know that some small, giggling part of him is sending a flock of pigeons to your house to poop on your car. Right after you’ve had it washed. After all, he loved to laugh too…”
You have my respect and my sympathies Zelda. Thank you for sharing it even though you didn’t need to.
Please read her complete words at:
http://zeldawilliams.tumblr.com/
Some blogs come. Sometimes I wake up with them already written in my head. There is an easy satisfaction with giving these stories away having sheltered them for so long in my own mind. But sometimes they get torn out of me, like I’m painfully giving birth to them. I always eagerly await the other side of these blogs. The sweet sorrow flooding with relief for having somewhere else to put them. This is one of those blogs.
People often track their lives like in the bible – “before christ’ and “after christ”. I do that too. Before the divorce and after. I’m surely not the first person who recognizes this fragment in their timeline for this exact reason. There are plenty of groups, meetings, books and TV shows devoted entirely to this subject. I don’t believe I am any less or more impacted by it than anyone else but from my own eyes, it matters. It changed me. Deeply.
When I first started to imagine writing this blog, I was overwhelmed with how badly I wanted to write about the bad stuff. I’ve erased it about three times because they keep sneaking in, disguised as harmless explanations but really they want recognition. Look what’s been done to me. Broken hearts always seem to want retribution. I have been seeking refuge from this desire for the better part of three years. I am haunted by the idea of forgiveness. It feels impossible some days to just let by gones be by gones. But I keep rolling Buddha’s words around in my head: Not forgiving is like poisoning yourself and waiting for the other person to die. Dammit Buddha. That is some solid logic.
I want to list for you all the reasons I should not forgive him. I want you to read them and recognize how terribly I suffered. I want someone to write him a strongly worded letter of admonishment. What I do not want is for you to look behind the heavy curtain and investigate my side of it, my contribution to the end. Of course, there is that. And perhaps this sense of denying forgiveness has a lot to do with forgiving myself. For my sins during the relationship, and there was many, and the way I short circuited my grief of rejection to include every living being on the planet so as to save myself from getting hurt again. Of course, this required me to in turn reject people who loved me in the process. Oh what a tangled web we weave…
But here’s my first best go at it. I have spent most of this day trying to remember the good things about him, the things that made me fall in love with him in the first place since you cannot grieve what you don’t love. I will admit, I have tantrumed several times as the lovely memories got mixed up with the hard ones. I can hear myself thinking “what the …” in response to some of his incredible kindness to me in the beginning. I still feel tricked. I have to stuff the idea down that he did some of those things intentionally to hide a whole bunch of other things. I’ll never know. I can only tell you what I remember and how it made me feel then. And in handling them all day, I have found some genuine space for them separate from the rest of it. It’s not quite forgiveness all the way, it’s demi-forgiveness. And it’s all I have today.
I feel compelled to tell you about the time he carried me through a lake to a floating dock in the middle of the night and we lied on our backs talking to each other and the stars. It was one of our first dates. I remember thinking right then, “I could love this man”.
His friends were the originators of BrandiLand..saying he was lost in it. We talked on the phone for hours. I couldn’t even tell you about what, but it was endless. One time he even talked to me almost the entire time while he was at a party and he passed me off to everyone there and said, “Tell this girl how much I like her” and I was regaled with tales from virtual strangers about how impacted he had been by my presence.
I remember the first time he went away to go visit his mom for 2 weeks. It felt like an eternity even though we talked every day. He shared very intimate things about his early life with his family – some sweet things, some disappointments, things he was struggling with being home. Without any forethought, I blurted out, “I want you to come live with me when you come home”. I surprised myself having been a cautious woman for many years. He said he knew I was going to say that for some reason and he was quick to say, “Dear god, yes”. I picked him up from the airport, he looked so handsome in his dress pants and baby blue button down shirt, all wrinkled and buttons askew from the long flight. He smiled at me from way far off as he caught sight of me coming down the escalator. And I stupidly stood and smiled at him. It seemed like an hour before he got to the bottom and we couldn’t get to each other fast enough. It was happening. Our beginning. He asked me to marry him with a baby blue stone because he knows I hate diamonds. Baby blue memories. Baby, baby blues…
I can still see him walking, barefoot, down the middle of our street, while our house burned behind us. I was just standing there watching the fireman struggle with the fire in the roof. I knew the house was going to be lost. I didn’t know one other tangible thing at that moment. I couldn’t grasp onto anything and it felt like I was just floating there. When I turned and saw him, I was utterly entranced by the sight of him, so self-assured, smiling at me with his head cocked to the side and that “Come here baby” look he gave me. He wrapped me up in a blanket and hugged me and said everything was going to be ok. And I believed him.
I have been trying, trying, trying to burn those memories into my mind over the smouldering, putrid aroma of our break up. It is the most insane thing, to love someone and then not know them at all, never see them again, never have the chance to reminisce of these things. It has always felt like the right way to break up was to have a moment where we shared those things that we would remember, those things that made a difference and say “Thank You” for all the good that came. People think I’m crazy when I say that but I’ve done it. And I picture all the people I’ve ever met who had terrible, bitter separations and how different it would look if it was mandatory on the way out to say a few nice things you’ll remember.
But something funny happens to people when they get caught in the face of their bad decisions. There is no last few nice memories to share. It is just a heart tearing open trying to stem the blood with paltry excuses and denial. And you are left sputtering and gasping for air, viciously clawing your way out, trying to save yourself.
There is someone back in my life who has been graciously sharing his love stories with me, assuring me that love does come despite my cynical and protective denial of this for the last 3 years. I am so grateful for this light at the end of the tunnel, the signalling of a certainty that it exists. I am trying to find a way back to love by practising with the ones I already love. By being mindful of myself in close contact with others. By being mindful of the times we hurt each other and rally back any ways. There are examples of it all around me. Relationships I have nurtured and nourished for years that prove my theory wrong…Fairy tales are NOT just for suckas. Given a look into my life, you would be astonished at the calibre of women who have stood by me and raised me from the dead when I had all but given up. It’s not the same thing, humbly I accept that having someone love you as their partner, as their muse is different than your lady friends but it doesn’t overshadow it. On paper, my love life is a disaster but in the bigger picture, it is extraordinary. And if I died tomorrow, no one could say I wasn’t completely wrapped in some serious love. And save for the empty space left by him, I would never have realized by comparison how full the rest of my life really is. That is the way life works, it is in the absence that we appreciate what is present. A gift if you will, when you’re ready to open it.
by Aleya Kassam
"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them." ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
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