Love Letters to Anne

Blood and love. These things are what drove me. Belief in them pushed me further. But it was a rough road travelled.

You see, my experience with love, both in a family setting, and in a romantic setting, was fraught with negativity and poison. Every love I've had had been toxic. It's what I knew, what I was raised in and eventually emulated. Now, don't misunderstand, I'm not blaming my past for failed marriages, or bad relationships, but it is where I learned all these things in a normative environment, meaning it's what was there. No real examples or even conversations about what healthy love would look like. And all I ever wanted, desperately in fact, was to be loved, to feel that love, and to return that love. But this was missing, so I searched it out in other ways.

I became enamored with the Void. I engaged in philosophy and Eastern influences about the cosmic and the Divine. I was looking for that love in the Void. The Void has nothing in it. But sensations that felt like what I believed love would feel like pulled at me in the form of drugs and alcohol, and I could access the Void anywhere at any time with them.

Love on tap.

It keeps me awake at night even to this day. Currently, for example, I have been up about 20 hours on 3 hours of sleep. And that’s an improvement from the last cycle. It’s like this a lot actually.

I have suffered insomnia for decades. I live on naps apparently. Even now, deep into the night, as you all sleep, I am working through all these things. It carries over into my day life as well. This process of going through it all over again is painful and leaves a residual echo I carry with me like a millstone around my neck.

It’s not anger though, there’s none of that. I just regret all the things stolen from me and my soul still aches at times from all the spiritual scar tissue.

I want to be clear however, I don’t hold any animosity towards anyone anymore. I have moved beyond that and sometimes when I think of these things deeper than in passing, memories swell up and emotionally, being damaged and still on the road to healing, I falter at times.

I retreat from these things, or I seem to retreat anyway, and then I kind of shut down. I go to my safe room in the tornado as the house comes apart around me. But you will not see any of this. I appear cool and almost aloof to some. But inside, the turmoil churns. But I learned to not show weakness because in the jungle there is always the possibility of death at any moment. I stay to myself, and keep a vigilant watch of my awareness.

Even in the Void, I can’t let go sometimes.

The whole subject of love was a foreign concept, that drove me slowly insane, and was also illusive. You must understand I have tried in love, both in family and romantically. But I didn’t get equipped with the necessary tools to negotiate and compromise. I had to seek the knowledge of these things elsewhere. Abandon all hope, ye who enters here. It is a maddening experience and an exhausting exercise. From what I understand and have witnessed, love, in all its glory, is a complicated emotion in the best of circumstances with people I would say have better abilities than I in this regard.

But still I craved it. Desperately. Enough to drink poison just because I was thirsty.

And then there is the issue of my blood. This always escaped me as a child and young adult. How different my family experience was compared to most. I’m just looking at it from a better place now. But blood was the unbreakable bond. All my bonds were conditional. All of them. Family, wives, relationships less serious or intense, all of this was me on the outside looking in. Wondering what that love would be, could be anyway. If I could ever find them…they have been my missing piece, blood was where I was incomplete. Blood cannot be denied even if you can walk away from it.

I was walking towards it. I grew tired and fed up with always looking in and never being secure in anything or anyone.

Everyone deserves this. I just wanted to know where I came from and who my people were. I wanted to know what kind of medical dispositions I might be inclined towards. This is mine to know, and if I was going to be denied my basic human rights to know these things, then I was going to disregard and hold suspect any and everyone. All the things you held as dear and sacred, I would now view with criminal suspicion. I didn’t believe anything I was taught by the system that enslaved me and held me down. This was terrorism on a real personal level. I still struggle with your institutions today.

Almost everything I do is a trauma response to the ends of survival.

All I ever wanted was love. And the damage done has been carried my whole life.

A life full of wreckage I couldn’t let go. I was lost in a forest.