Dearly Beloved.

I am having trouble accepting this truth. The truth that you and I are no longer a we.

How did this happen?

How did we get here?

I’m not out of line when I say that this feels like a death of a living, breathing thing that you and I birthed and raised and then abused and starved with our outdated programs and fears, our need to be right; whipped with our power struggles and tortured with our resentments until all that remained was a void where once was joy.

My mind finds the hot spots of old memories, the good times. It seeks them out like a tongue would a fractured tooth, over and over, making sure it’s still there.

“Yes, it’s still broken, dear one,” Stillness inside me whispers, kindly, gently, with compassion, and I double over once more, as if punched in the gut.

I hold the limp body of our relationship close, hug it to my heart and rock back and forth, sobbing, wishing it to breathe and knowing that I’ve arrived too late.

I feel the pains of withdrawal twist my insides and an ancient part of me insists that I feel it all.

I am here, hour after hour, the tortured and the torturer in the same body. I miss our morning calls, the way you’d say my name, or call me Love, as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

The mind demands I build a wall of stones for next time the memories of us arrive with their false promises of comfort, while Stillness reaches her arms around me and whispers, “It is only pain, dear one. Only pain.”

“Are you sad?” I want to know. “Do you miss me? When you think of me, does the knot in your gut tighten so much you think you’ll never eat again? Have you cried for us? Have you thought about the last time we made love? The way I studied your face as if some part of me knew this would be the last time?”

And I know this isn’t helpful and I wonder what masochistic part of me reaches for only the good memories and tortures me with the possibility that I’ll never kiss your lips again, or feel the soft hairs on the back of your head with my fingers. How is it that I so easily forget the reason for our demise; the simple fact that we could not meet each other’s needs, that trust had been broken too many times to mend.

Photos of us keep showing up on my phone, taunts of our failure. A Facebook memory from a year ago, our smiling faces reflected in the lens of the camera, our smiles showing none of the doubt that had already taken root in my belly, pregnant with the knowledge that we were not going to make it. I’m not sure which would be worse, erasing you from every social media page, or growing slowly numb to seeing the past show up in the present.

Like a mother bereft, I move through this grief full of switchbacks and dead ends and each night, as I curl up to weep out another shard of grief, I know I’m getting closer to acceptance. I know time holds the gift of freedom on the other side of grief.

Stillness speaks to me in meditation. “There is no need to hold it together,” she says. “You have all you need to heal. No matter the grief with its jagged pain, the world is outside your front door, love is pulsing through the veins of your life.

“Surrendering is good medicine,” Stillness goes on. “Do not analyze. Do not fall into interpretation. No one is the bad guy here. We are all victims and perpetrators in this game of life.

“Do not harden, dear one. Do not raise walls of armor around your heart. Allow the pain to flow through you, like the wind moves through branches of the spruce tree outside your window and once you’ve cried enough, welcome the moments of reprieve when the darkness subsides and light fills your aching body."

I’m ready to let us go now.

In peace.

In love.

In acceptance.

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