its easy to hate yourself if all your love is inside someone else

Dear K-

We all have ghosts. Memory will soften their edges and airbrush away the flaws, and it will be tempting to accept these sea glass versions, but you must strive to recall the original. You threw the bottle away for a reason: it was trash. You couldn’t use it anymore. It wasn’t going to help you. It was just clutter. It doesn’t matter how much our mind’s eye will transform the painful shards of glass into beautiful opaque pebbles. We can never have those pebbles in reality. The reality is so, so much harsher. You will reach for her shape and she will cut you, just like she did before. Some scars don’t show as well as others.

I know you want to find her. I know your heart feels drawn to her like a ship looking for a port. Don’t be fooled by the siren’s song. You must carry onward, searching for a safer shore. I cannot guarantee you safe passage. Keep looking up at the stars; they are shining for you now. Remind yourself that in the end, this will be the better story to write yourself. You are powerful. You deserve to be loved by someone who can give you their whole heart with no expectation of receiving yours in return. You should exchange willingly. By choice. If someone reaches in and takes your heart and gives you nothing to fill its place except a shadow of a breath, then you will never be happy.

She can never make you happy. You cannot live or love with a ghost heart. I know you are hurt. I know you have cuts running deep through your bones. But I also know you have the bud of a heart still caged within your breast. It just needs to be nurtured, encouraged, cared for, and after a bit of time it will grow back into the full, caring heart that I know you can possess. It is going to be painful. It’s hard to grow an organ back after it’s been ripped away from you completely. There are many sinews to be formed and severed tissues to be mended. But once it blooms back into its full glory, you will no longer dream of ghosts.

I have started going out on dates again. I am timid and skeptical of everyone. I have been so abused and broken that I feel I cannot trust anyone I meet. Even now, with my best prospect, I have to hold my joy in check. I find myself looking for the catch, looking for the inevitable fault. I start thinking to myself thoughts about potential other girlfriends, or perhaps a hidden wife, or perhaps he’s secretly got an addiction. Maybe he’s only leading me along for some sick joke. Maybe it’s just a game he plays in which he captures a girl’s heart then tramples all over it, tearing apart her ventricles, and laughs about it later with his mates. Maybe I’m misinterpreting all his motions, and he’s indifferent to my presence but too bored to spend the day at home alone.

Even still, the prospect of anything new gives me a slightly lighter step. My breaths are shallow with anxiety but the air tastes sweet. There is something out there, K. Don’t give up hope. There’s something waiting for us, yet. Perhaps it is over a week of insomnia and shattered nerves speaking, but I think there’s something better for us. There has to be. Because I can’t live with just this.

The air is painfully sweet. It burns my lungs but I don’t know if I could have it any other way. It is about time something lit a fire inside me.

Don’t give up. I couldn’t stand to suffer through this world without my complement.

-k

In A Tunnel Under The Mountain

Dear K,

In my dreams she still comes to me. I'm as in love with her as I ever was. As I ever will be I suspect. Love like this doesn't fade, the edges just get softer like sea glass, tossed and tumbled by the waves until a bottle of Mountain Dew becomes an emerald. She told me in the dream that she was getting married and I've been burning with jealous rage all day. It was a dream. It was a dream. It was a dream. I can't stand it. I want her to come to me. I want to go to her. I want to say I'm sorry until my throat cracks and I choke on blood and I'll still scream to God I'm sorry. I miss her. I'm in love with a ghost, only she's out there.

I have to remind myself every day that I ended it. I was the one who looked around at it and said I'd had enough. I couldn't be that unhappy anymore. I couldn't let her push me around and push my friends away and push my sisters away, and I want children. I want to have beautiful little babies that stare up at me with wonder, and I want to raise them out in the country where you can't tell the fireflies from the stars in the midnight skies. I want that. But I want her. I want her to the point of tears. Some days if I breathe in too sharply I can feel the like of broken glass where my heart used to be. Some days it is hard to stop crying. I've learned how to cry on the inside and the tears just run down my insides and pool in my feet. I miss her. I miss the smell of her hair, her breath, her eyes, her voice, I miss her hands and feet and lungs and knees and hips and stomach and shoulders and breasts and teeth and tongue and nose and neck and ass and calves and thighs and forearms and elbows and scapula and liver and intestines and every other part therein.

I'm drowning in a ruined love.

Tell me there is air worth breathing,

K

Dear K,

I got the job. Today was my first day. It's a miserable little dungeon full of the kindest people I've met in this new city.

I don't like it here. I miss home. I miss being able to ride my bicycle out into the countryside and see fields and smell fresh country air and hear bird song and feel God stir me through the wind. The wind blows here too, but I don't feel God in it. I don't feel his kind hands, I feel grit and I smell garbage and fumes and people. The endless crowds of people. They press in around you. There is no escape from the crowds. This is how I die, pressed around by a mass of people.

Move to Des Moines. I'll move back. We'll write together. We can be neighbors and drink bottles of wine and sit on each other's back porches staring up into the night sky.

I feel older than I've ever felt, and I miss my home.

Take care of yourself,

K