You Get To Miss It
(Nicaragua, 2011)
Walking out is the hardest fucking thing you could go through. Forget the bankruptcy and the broken limbs and the car accidents and the diseases and the rest of it. When you leave, you become a leaver and that is something you will always be.
You will look back for an eternity, and a piece of you will always be broken. There is no fixer. You will long for something that is gone, and you will wish with all of your being that you could make it right, but you will never be able to do that. You will look for a door that you wish you could magically walk back through, but it will be gone. And you'll be standing there - with yourself.
Don't leave my mind. Sleep out the sin and start again.
A relationship is a wild animal. A beast of the field that we bring into our living rooms. We pet their rough fur, and we hear them lightly roar while we watch tv, and we think it's cute. And all the while, a nature that we don't understand is evolving and breathing and becoming something far beyond the scope of you and me.
I'm not sorry for where I am now, and I'm not sorry for who I've become. I am better and smarter and stronger now than I have been in many moons, but I am sorry for the way it ended. I'm sorry that I couldn't have been more of a man. I laboured over that choice, and I will labour for a long time. It's my bed, and I will lie in it.
But beyond my petty worrying and waning, I know deeply - without a hazy doubt in a cloudless sky that I made the right choice. I was trying to listen and I was trying to be guided, and tonight, I gained some confirmation of that fact. The storm seemed to shift slightly, and the galaxy opened. And a tiny fragment of weight lifted, and my psyche changed - it altered.
Sometimes, when we carry a burden for long enough, it falls off our backs and we don't even realize it's gone - and sadly, and oddly, and sickly, we miss the pain now that it's gone, because it was there with us for so long.
