For Whatever it is Worth

At one moment in my youth, I lived briefly through rose-tinted visions, nineteen and reeling in the whirlwind of discovery, and maintaining some assemblance of mental order.  I had met and loved a few men my age, equally dazed and confounded by this paradoxical newness of purpose and devotion to reckless abandon.

The 1st taught me the disillusion in obsession.  The 2nd taught me that there were actual men who lusted after me.  The 3rd gave me the ability to admit I had a lot to learn in lovers' arms.  The 4th taught me unrequited love is a sickness to be cured by abandonment.  And then, there was you, my 1st true love.

I will always feel your trauma inside of me. No apologies can ever do it justice. You were a trembling lover who only let go...  as I brushed the hair back over your ear while you slept.  The French have named it a little death that left you excising demons in my arms, You caught truth inside the words of Emily Dickinson.

"The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;
  
And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty (privilege) to die."

By means of writing our names in strange signatures, you scribbled that passage of her poem by the side, and I felt it my duty and privilege to mend and sanctify your struggling and suffering.  Your kind of insanity was prudent, necessary for your survival. You thought you were lucky to have me.  But I fell from the grace of our exaltation.

I have no reason other than the confusion within between my mind, heart, and flesh.  Split from reason, voices around and inside myself beckoned me to try rekindling my obsessions, my lust for more than sanctity and safety.  I betrayed you, and I can't forgive myself for the ignorance and lust for more than what I had always dreamed.

I never did and won't ever deserve you.  I do this, go through this...  daily.  But if you should need me, for any reason, other than the love I yearned to have for decades, seek me out.  I will not bite at the chance to return to your love.  This yearning wishes not to be forgiven; that isn't how life and the unknown play out mankind's destiny.  I can't promise a perfection in time.  To know that you are safe and relatively sound, that is my bond...  for whatever it is worth.