Amorphous

Cleaning out a closet I ran into one of your old journals. Once I realized what it was, fully, the words I’d read seared me inside. I wanted to close it, throw it, rip it, burn it, then pretend that I’d never found it. But the more I read the more it somehow made me feel better.

You were just a child. You had boyfriend pants, brightly dyed hair, both of your nipples pierced, and your head tilted toward the world. Your sweet, flowing innocence was evident in every looped “l”, every dotted “i”, and every praise for an unsmoked cigarette.

In your innocence we were giants. We’d taken a chance. We’d overcome huge obstacles. And somehow, that simple fact made us both bigger than anything else in the world in your eyes. There was nothing we couldn’t step on or run through should it get in our way. I loved you for that innocence. I loved you for the freedom that brought us. That should have been enough. But it wasn’t.

When experience met you nose to nose, your innocence wasn’t enough to over come it. That which once anchored you and gave you liberty to claim the world as your own was now holding you underwater as the oceans of life rose around you. The only choices you had were to cut loose or die.

I don’t regret you. I don’t regret any moment spent together in that early morning light of life, where everything looks beautiful and warmly tinted.

And as I placed your journal among all the other things I still have that belong to you, I felt a little sadness for what was lost, but mostly peace having learned that what we had together wasn’t wrong, or forced, or built on lies. It simply couldn’t exist in this world and was never meant to last. But those things that it did bring us will last forever, and life wouldn’t be the same without them.