Beginning Again
Excerpts from a recovered opendiary entry, 11/02/2009.
“Two nights ago, I sat here and wrote my first entry. When I pressed “Save,” it had disappeared. I figure that’s a good enough metaphor as any for me.
Halloween was a couple of nights ago – i was Phoenix rising from the ashes, featuring my baby [bump] as the egg. That’s another good metaphor … A whole new life. A new life amongst many lifetimes, all lived in a 35 year span. And I find myself in the phoenix’s place of rebirth once more. Beginning Again….
My journey is a journey of healing…
I hope that this diary will help me get somewhere, that i will not remain as ash, scattered easily by the wind, but become condensed, distilled, refined through the fire of circumstance into something purely alive, purely unique, and painfully beautiful.
Once again, I begin again.”
- ( End of entry)
First New Entry 10/18/2024 (15 years later)
“Begin again again” was a phrase I’ve carried throughout the years, returning to it again and again.
On October 14, at 12:35 my soulmate breathed his last breath, surrounded by his family. John was 50 years old, just like me. We’ve been friends since I first repeated his accented enunciation of the word “time.” [And that was the beginning and end of it.]
That means we got 35 years, not all of them together, most of it not officially together, and yet still tied. He once called us two hands on one body, two fingers on one hand. He was the immovable rock and I was the ever-shifting storm that danced against it.
And, at some point in the early 2000’s, we went from having our own opendiary accounts to creating one where we planned to dream together. I’m not sure if it’s recoverable, but that is my goal. In the process of trying to recover it, I found this “newer” old account of mine. This is not my oldest account, but the first entry seemed to fit right into what I am doing now. On my journey of healing, beginning again.
This time, I hope to use this diary to unwind our correspondence and through that process engage with John, and find something more about me. My biggest question is, where is the rock within me? His words are now my epistles, since it’s all I have. Old letters, emails, texts and DM’s and what I remember of our phone calls.
I guess John is my new ghost boyfriend. Or at least my spirit friend. Because I’m not ready to let go. I’m going to ask him to take my hand, and hope it will really be him and not some other entity. I had wanted to ask him to haunt me, but it felt rude knowing how tired he was and ready to rest. I still need time with him. I need to understand what I was unable to while he was here.
I need to calm down enough to understand the language of rocks. I need to understand him to understand myself. For, what is the shape of the storm without the mountain? I love him. And so. We begin again, with whatever we have to begin with.
——
Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it’s age old pain,
It’s ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.
Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.