TheStoryOfMyBecoming

Dear love,

Even the depth of you could not rout distance.
Granted, you spread yourself like a carpet, welcoming us at your table.
Wrapping us tight in your warmth; allowing us to feast even to the bone of the depth of you.
We’ve smiled widely at and with you,
danced unencumbered in your presence,
drank you in and settled the full weight of us on your sturdy knees.

Our constant “damn you ocean”, protestations serving as both a prayer and promise that we could vanquish its efforts to play gully between us.  And try we did.
The promise of forever clawing impatiently at your window.  We’ve welcomed its advent and conclusion.
The trail we cling to tightly still, is a lifetime of gratitude in our luck for having met you at your best.
What wonder. Amen.

Though valorous in effort, burning all your ends to serve as both lighthouse and compass, we now capitulate to space, a more fervid opponent against any of you that we could conjure.
We bless the Lord for the breadth of you,
breathing you in still. 

The cost of you was a one we could not augur, an existence bound. Forever in transit.
Laughter caged in moments neither here nor there, anxiously floating somewhere in between. Lives firmly settled in the middle, a thick cloud of uncertainty hanging in the space between us.
Plans up in the air; Waiting.

When people asked you about us and distance, you’d always say: “what’s the alternative to distance? Not being together? There is no choice there for me, together is all I see. I’d rather be together than apart, so this is always better.” What you meant to say was, this is the cost of love we hadn’t accounted for:
Existing at half mast, anchored on an expectation to one day put down roots.
Chests heavy with decisions about our lives that never fully felt like ours.
Or ever fully fledged, or flowed or flew.
Our lives, waiting to be exhaled.

That we were burning ourselves at the altar of love to the death of us.

So love, know that even you – the best of symphonies, cannot fill the space of a slipping “someday”.  Cannot anchor uncertainty in any certainty.
Cannot bring meaning to days numbered “not yet”.
Cannot give us permission to individually live ferociously; and fully; and freely.

The unoccupied space between is a mightier opponent than the sum of us and you.
Lives lived as though the starter pistol hasn’t gone off, with two people eagerly waiting to take off, cannot but yield bitterness