Love as Death

It is so sad that we erase each other after a break up.  (You might think it “cringe” to post these pictures after a breakup but I implore you to read on and linger in a new way to honor and let love die with me.)

Are we pretending that life never happened?

When people die we post the memories.

When a relationship dies we delete them.

It adds another layer of trauma and rejection and although I understand the sweeping away of evidence; I do not agree with it.

Too much beauty gets erased because we can not love and grieve fully.

We can not look at our shadows.

We can not look at our light.

Our love.

Our lack of it.

Our failure to understand it or maintain it or whatever thought/trigger/ emotion/memory of it existing as we see pictures.

Or memory of it ending

Because we as a culture do not know how to grieve.

I’m still learning.

I remember doing this with my exes. Especially the painful ones filled with shame at who I was, the way I lived seemed a lie, and what I tolerated with them hurt me to revisit since I could not forgive and my only recourse was removal.

I feel differently about this one. I was awake and responding to each moment. I did everything fully conscious and with as much love as I knew how. Apologized as I went along. Faced and embraced fears over and over.

I wish the outcome were different sometimes but I regret nothing.

I’ve been crying nearly every day, now multiple times per day since November when Winnie died.

So many deaths have followed and I don’t tell you this to evoke sorrow or play victim, I tell you this to normalize how to digest deep grief.

I had maybe a brief few days of this settling of tears over friends and loved ones dying, over fears of us ending, because hope arose as communications between James and I felt harder in some ways but phenomenally better since we had new tools.

I felt a rebirth was on the horizon for us.

Then the tearing apart happened, death once again, and I’m still trying to reconcile all the information and emotion.

I am crying multiple times per day as the transitioning of so many things/people/places/ideas/dreams/moment being destroyed and simultaneously reborn.

They say love can be in the leaving and I agree to an extent

But

It feels hard to wrap my body mind & heart around since love has previously existed mostly as a story of integration and today I’m finding its story in the unraveling threads of dis-integration.

My friend said “it’s like when people give their child up for adoption because they know they can not take care of them properly.”

“Uhg”, I said “exactly, and it actually feels more like abortion or miscarriage.”

I told James the night of the news as we cried together trying to co-regulate our flooding nervous systems

“I feel like I just gave birth to a still born, and it was us.”

And if you knew our deeper story you could follow that thread into another universe of meaning that is too tangled to explore rn but I see it.

We’d worked so hard.

I, particularly, felt like I was carrying the relationship and when I prayed under the Leo full moon to stop over functioning, exhausted I cried “i release my desire for him to desire me, I want him want what he wants instead of holding him hostage to wanting deeper intimacy with me and instead hope that what he wants IS me, but I release the chords tying him to me”and…

By the end of the week he may not have found what he wanted,

But he knew at least what he did not.

I was hoping he’d find what he wanted was me.

Us.

To believe and keep going.

But I’m trusting the dying of a thing.

I’m trusting his prayer m, his answer, and soul’s path.

I’m remembering I don’t know what God’s will is for him. (Or me most times;)

But I know enough to know it is whatever is happening and I pray to keep co-operating WITH it.

There’s so much I can not possibly express but I hope some of these tidbits help others going through the vulnerable mess of being human and having hearts and getting hurt and healing.

This is how to be human and spirit.

To live life in the Tao and the now.

Knowing that even though it might not fully makes sense yet,

this too

Is love.

Unconventional, maybe

Unconditional, absolutely.

I will not erase any piece of my grief

or my love, my story, nor you; within it and without it.

I loved you. I practiced loving you for 6 amazing years. I will now unlearn to love you. I will learn a different form of love which I call respect and honor.

Is it still love? Perhaps. But I won’t call it by that sacred name because it confuses my heart.

Time and patience will reconcile the words and definitions that are so important to my healing.

For now I know the way to the old love is shut.

And I lay us to rest

Not in discarded erasable pieces.

But as one whole and holy peace.

May these pictures honor the pieces and bring what peace is.

Mikelle