It’s all happening here without you

Which naturally means that it’s all happening there without me.

Friday Pragmatism has been deferred until Sunday evening when I get home from my sister’s.

I wanted you to meet my sister
My brother
My family
They’re as defiant and imperfect as I am
As stubborn
As beautiful, even when I don’t like them, which isn’t often

I wanted you to be there when I wrote about you
So you could see the words coming to life
What breathed into them
When it was you that gave birth to them
Or were the butterfly to their hurricane

I wanted you to be there for the moment I decided to use capitals again
And to erase full-stops from certain writings

I wanted you to be with me when I discovered my body
When I learned where I love to be touched
So I could show you
We could discover together
And you would be fascinated and we would teach ourselves about you in the same way

I wanted you to be here for the birth of my first niece
Then her baby brother, my nephew
I wanted you to see how close we are
How good I am with these children and how afraid and inspired I was by them when they were crying infants

I needed you here for this
When I still had my brains
When I was still clever and conceited enough to write such a thing
Before it all went really bad
Much worse than it ever has been
When I was young and agile and still had more than one hundred percent of my energy for more than fifty percent of the time
When I had the words to love you with
The patience for discipline and academic process
I’m writing them all down
It’s so important
It’s so important that I write down that I was capable
And that it’s all still happening
When you look at me now and wonder who I am
What vague shadow of myself I’ve become
I beg of you to remember
All this still happens
It happens in the most wild and beautiful way
It’s there
Even though you can’t see it
I don’t want you to stay now
I don’t want to come back, if I get to come back, and know that I’ve given you such sorrow
Before you even arrive, I’m telling you to leave
Take everything that is whole and good, useful and emotionally gratifying from me that you can
And then go
Don’t let me damage you more than is fair
We don’t talk about fairness much
We never did
And it’s easy to be clever and passionate and try and out-manouvre it
But days will come when that won’t work
And you should be wise and brave enough to see it
I will still love you
Always
And I will feel loved by you

It was years too late
Even now
With the words
The words coming from my fingers right now
It was years too late
Whatever it is that broke me
Wherever it was that I was sent and clawed my way back from
I was only ever here part of the time since then
I only ever existed in part
To those places I am going back
And eventually the glue that filled the fracture will perish when the wound endures
You will try and fill it again
It is part of the great measure of your spirit
But even now, it is years too late

Be thankful for our joys and pains
Our days
Our words
And our silent languages
Dialects of touch
I am
I’m grateful
When I think of how grateful I am, I decide to stop writing