Out Loud

How did it end up this way?  Me here, with someone else, and You, there, devestated for it?  When did this happen?  How could it all have changed so quickly?  Sometimes I lay there at night and wonder how I got where I am.  I lay in her arms and think about you and all it does is make me sad, sad, sad…

How did it get to be that I wake up in someone else’s bed?  Someplace that is so unfamiliar and common and comforting at the same time.  Someplace that makes sense to be my future.  Someplace that’s already started my plans.  Someplace where I want my heart to want to be.

How did I wake up and roll over and know that it’s not you?

I was devestated.  I keep reminding myself that you broke my heart and I was down and out and wasn’t even in Beverly Hills.  I keep telling myself that when we were together, I knew we shouldn’t be together.  I knew that you were not right for me.  Then last night, as I lay in her arms, all I could think about was you, and where you were, and what you were doing, and how you were feeling.

I cry for the future that I will not have with you.  I cry for the children that will not run around with wild hair and sun browned skin.  I cry for the children who will not light up your face – whose faces will not light up when they see yours.  My heart aches at the thought that those children will not be born.  She won’t have wild hair and mud on her jeans and cowboy boots riding her dirt bike.  She won’t smell fresh and clean just moments before I come home from work.  She won’t grow up to wear her jingle dress and long braids down her back and eat indian fry bread and cry from the belly ache it gives her.  She won’t exist.  She won’t exist in our love.

That devestates me all over again.

I cry for the fact that I will never hold my grand-daughter.  I will never hold the manifestation of your love for her and their love for each other.  I will never get hugs and kisses from my little Kendalyn Rae.  I will never get to see her in this outfit or that.

I cry because she may not live to see the day where she wears that outfit, or she knows her grandma.  She may never know what it is to laugh from pure joy and the smile on your face, or feel the sun directly on her back as she sits eating watermelon in the park.  She may die from the hole in her heart.  And then, will you die from the hole in yours?

I want my heart to follow my head.  I want my heart to give up the "what ifs" and the "maybes" and get down to the business of loving and committing and accepting this future as it is.  I have doubts, and those doubts creep in at night.  They creep in when I see something that reminds me of you.  They creep in every day, sometimes for hours at a time.

I cried last night.  I lay in her arms and cried because for 45 minutes I laid there and thought of you, and wanted to touch you and hold you and have you kiss and caress me.  I wanted YOU again.  I wanted it to be YOU.  I wanted YOU to adore me like she adores me.  I wanted YOU to be from my world, too.  I wanted you to have ambition and dreams beyond laying in bed all weekend.  I wanted you to have ambition beyond taking the next hit or watching the next hour of MTV.

I wanted you to want to be more like me.  I wanted you to want the same things that I wanted.  And if you had given just a bit more than you had…if you’d shown that you were willing to compromise in some way, I would be there now, with you, holding your hand at night, kissing you lightly on the cheek, laughing at your jokes, lighting up my eyes.  It would’ve been you.

And so now, instead, I mourn the loss of a love.  The loss of my best friend.  The lost of my little Ember burning bright in your eyes.  The loss of my grand baby girl and all the love and hope and wishes that went into her creation.  I lose that even still now, today, as I sit with my mom in a hospital. As I sit with her and wish you were there to love and support and care.  I sit here, too, still wishing, and knowing that it’s not meant to be.

So, maybe she is here for right now.  And maybe she is here forever.  I do not know what the future brings for me.  A week ago, I was excited about her, and last night I found myself again wanting for something that was not there.

It is different now.  In some ways, I want the old back. I want to return to you, but I’m still afraid to say it out loud.

The journey is the reward

Lao-Tzu