maybe then...



“I want you to build your home inside of me,” I whispered into your ear without forethought. The words rose from deep within me, my heart speaking louder than any words my mind would have before ever allowed to fall from my lips. In the following moment before you entered me I thought about how it was the most romantic proposition I had ever uttered in the whole entirety of my life. As you entered me I realized how deeply I loved you.

In that hour you did, you came into me bringing all that you were to rest in my body and spirit. We shared the moments of physical bonding in all its passion, but when you left my side your spirit remained. Little did I know that the spiritual bonding would be irrevocable, nor that I would ever want it to be shaken loose because I would long to be free of your essence.

In the following weeks we lived together, laughed and loved, and planned a bright future. I nicknamed you "Farm Boy" and you nicknamed me "Short Stop". I had never known such happiness. We were inseparable.

But that light dimmed as we began to grow apart in the following months. Despite my asking and begging you to not to bottle yourself up so often, you still did. Your love of Mr. Walker cautioned me to consider walking. You were so selfish when you drank. And dangerous.

Eventually, I did leave you, yet you never left me. All that you were had been invited in within that one moment when my mind betrayed me and my heart overcame me. It’s now been months since we’ve spoken. All should be lost and gone, and I could live with that, except I invited you to build a home inside of my everything. Now, that home is my prison. Now, it is merely a loveless house of pain and sorrow.

These recent weeks my heart has wandered about like an abandoned child in the orphanage I have become. I wonder if you somehow know what I’d let you do to me, if the bond travels the distance, and you too can feel the despair. And even if you don't, my mind would never allow me to tell. My mind is keen with knowing when enough is enough, even when my heart wants for more.

You know, they say time heals all wounds, but it’s not the wounds that concern me, it’s the bonding of spirit that I feel crushing me. Your walls are closing in on me.

The other night I lay down to be quiet within myself, to think through what to do about you being all over me, inside. I entered that meditative state of being between awareness and sleep, and stepped out of my body and into an altered reality created by the dark quarters of your alcohol soaked spirit.

I found myself standing in a dark and gray cemetery under an eclipsing moon. The wispy dreamscape was barren of life, save for the fog of my warm breath. There were no trees and no grass. There were no flowers of color resting at your gravesite as I stood before your headstone. My discontent had etched an epitaph there that read, ‘He loved Johnnie more than he loved me.’

I stood there a ghost of myself all the while feeling tears stinging my eyes as my heart ached in my motionless, vacant body. My experience was as real as it was visceral.

I dropped to my knees and felt the hardened earth meet them with pain. I fell onto my hands feeling the cold dirt not give way to my ghostly weightlessness. I raised my head to the epitaph and felt my eyes curse you for your weakness...and for mine. On my bed I was weeping while my heart was in its end stages of shattering. I slowly lowered myself to cover your grave with my body. It was so very, very cold as we lay apart.
I prayed for healing while you preyed within me, the cemetery and dirt that held you all parts of me.

I prayed that my tears would hydrate your dried bones and that my warm blood would rush your heart to beat again. I prayed that you would rise from the dirt and ascend into my arms. I prayed that my spirit would enliven yours so that the epitaph could be overwritten. I prayed that you would stand like a man of sound mind, look me in the eyes and say, “I love you more than anything else on the entire planet, Short Stop.” I wept in my bed while it didn’t happen. You remained stone cold in the dark recesses of my being, the walls of your barren, deathly home caving in on me.

Just before suffocation my eyes opened as I reentered my body, leaving the dead zone asunder. I wiped my tear soaked face to dry and pulled myself out of bed. I bundled myself up in my coat, hat, gloves and scarf, and stepped outside to view the eclipsing moon. I stood there and watched as the earth passed between the last of the sunlight illuminating the moon. I watched as it blinked out into the edge of darkness, my heart’s strings being pulled in so many directions like a wild tide.

While viewing the bereft of light, darkened moon I reflected on how I never foresaw any of this coming. I reflected on how little did I know that in that innocent moment of love and trust when my heart whispered in your ear to build yourself a home inside of me that I would be living there alone, without you.

Then, like a foreign radio in my head, I heard the words to a song playing in the far off distance of the barren cemetery, “I want to know what love is, I want you to show me.”

To this day, a week later, the song still haunts me. If only I could know whether it is your’s or my spirit that is singing, maybe then…

::Claps:: ::Whistles:: Great write!!!

Speaking as a recovering alcohilc whose buried his share of people and a lover of great words,this touched me very deeply
Thank you

Wow...

thank you for sharing yourself,defanately touched me,such honesty and vulnerability,amazing

Thanks for the kind words and kudos guys. I really needed to get this out. Maybe with it let loose something will give and I'll be able to fully move on. I just know I don't ever want to get so jaded that I become incapable of that honesty and vulnerability otterman mentioned.





Wow, it never occured to me that someone like yourself would read this and get something out of it.

And, you are welcome

Cosmicgypsy,
We drunks never realize until and IF we get sober that we never had relationships,WE TOOK HOSTAGES, and when and IF we get sober and learn the pain and destruction we caused in the lives of the people who loved us, most of these relationships are beyond repair, I am sorry for your loss

cownurse, the last six words of your post hit me hard...hard, hard, hard.

I was up for hours in the middle of the night last night thinking about what it would take to perhaps save the relationship, but every idea -- every should, could, and would -- was met with my higher guidance counteracting my hopes with what overall amounts to, 'building castles in the air is not in your best interest, dear one'...

I think I SHOULD be compassionate and know that alcoholism is a disease. I COULD gently lead him into counseling, and maybe then there WOULD be hope for a future for us. He SHOULD listen to me if he wants to have any kind of life...gawd, whether that life COULD and WOULD be with me or not. For cryin' out loud, I care about his well being, even more than I care about what I'm going to get out of it, the relationship salvageable or not.

cownurse, my life has been rift with alcoholics, my father, my brother, my mother and her husband (my step-father). The last two mates of mine too, including the guy above. Good grief the one before was a loooong relationship. We lived together for a year and a half, lived apart for five years because of the drinking, then after that time, and me trusting him when he said he was recovered, we got back together for nine years...of hell. In the last three years he got himself two DUIs. I can't tell exactly how many times he called me a f**king ***** and a loser while raging drunk because they were so very many. In the last few months before I left I would sleep with a knife under my pillow...omg, I was just that beside myself with misery. I used to beg God to take me, I was just that miserable.

I finally got out of that relationship last June with the help of some friends. I moved far, far away from him. According to my son he's really gone off the deep end since. He tells my son to tell me how much he loves me and misses me, that I always have a home with him, and he wants me back...???? What? This f**king ***** and loser?

Pfht.

And then another pfht. I meet this other guy, and I tell you true -- I had never felt more in love than I did with him. He hid his drinking problem very well at first, but...well, I guess you know how that story goes. At least...AT LEAST I had the presence of mind to not "hang in there" for the inevitable to just about damn near kill my spirit and loving nature, again.

Within a few weeks of arriving here last June I lost over 15 lbs without even trying and many years of aging disappeared from my haggered face. I was young and happy and vibrant again. And I was happy. Truely happy.

Apparently this vibrancy and happiness is attractive to problematic alcoholics. I would go out with my friend to the local bar (which is all there is to do for entertainment and socialization in this rural, small town) and I would get hit on, EVERY SINGLE TIME, by some drunk guy who wanted to complain about his ex and them telling me how they could make me happy...pfht, pfht, pfht. I can't go to the bar anymore because if one more sorry excuse for a man does this to me I'm going to go for his throat. I'm serious. I'd force myself to be mean and tell them to just leave me alone, but to no avail. They'd sit there repeating themselves. BAH! This happened far more than a handful of times.

The last time I went it was three guys over the course of the night that did this. I would move myself away from one to another part of the bar just to have another one sit down and start in on me.

Nope, I don't go to the bar anymore. I sit at home.

After the last time at the bar, the next day, I lamented to my friend asking her what it is that's wrong with me...WRONG WITH ME, to attract problematic men into my life. She told me it's not me -- really, cownurse, I pretty much have my act together. I'm educated in the field of counseling and have counseled addicts for a living. I'm a 14 year Reiki healer and through that modality have been of aide to many people to lighten up their darkling parts. But moreover, I've done my own interpersonal work and healing. I'm not a "lost one". I can sip on a cocktail for an hour or more. I can drink two or three beers or glasses of wine with dinner, and then stop. I refuse to drink and drive. I'll walk first. In other words, I myself don't have a drinking problem, get drunk, and make poor spur of the moment choices.

You know what my friend told me about it? She said, "V, you ooze sympathy, empathy, and healing energy like no other. You ooze confidence and competency. This is why you attract men like this, because they want to be fixed and deep down inside they want you, a strong woman, to help them."

Oh my god. The best of what I am attracts the last thing I need right to me like a horsefly to honey. Lol, cownurse, you should hear how I'm cursing like a sailor in my head.

"I am sorry for your loss"...yeah, bebe, I am too.

It's just what to do with the residual left over feelings. I don't approach intimacy frivolously, not physical intimacy nor spiritual intimacy. I don't casually fall in and out of love like changing socks. My body is not for whoring and my heart isn't a yo-yo.

"I am sorry for your loss"...perhaps I have to take this in like a gospel truth, feel it to the point where I know without a doubt that all is lost. What a harsh way to handle myself, though.

...this just makes me so damn sad. It makes me want to cry, but if I start I'm afraid I'll never stop. I have already cried about it, but now I prefer to draw on some stubborness. I'm not a cry baby, and I do believe in picking myself up by my boot straps and not wallowing in self pity. I am indeed a strong woman, but I'm so far from being made of stone and I don't have thick skin. I'm an empath and healer through and through, and I'll never develop thick skin. It's simply not possible and would go against the grain of my core being.

Good grief, I certainly didn't intend for this post to become this drawn out and personal. And I know there's not a single thing you or anyone else can say to me to make it better, so please don't drive yourself to try. Lol... not even kittens can help me now.

Really, I'm just working on and with myself here.

It's striking me as very ironic right now that I'm reflecting off of your experiential, kind hearted-worded energy to work it out, what with you being a recovering alcoholic and all.

Life and living it are indeed ironic, without fail.

Really, I'll pull it together eventually. I do have faith in this. But, I guess like the alcoholic has to hit rock bottom before they start the ascent up, so do I have to hit rock bottom. I just don't like it down there. Those sharp edges hurt.

...buuut, "I am sorry for your loss"...yeah, and I'm sick and tired of losing.

Cosmicgypsy,
I have learned in recovery that I am just 12 steps away from a drink on a daily basis,when I suffer the rejection that happens to all of us in this online dating, I always know the best thing to do is get out of myself and try to help some one else.
Myself I never had the experiences I perpetrated on my own family until after I got sober, I married another recovering alcoholic, everything was great for 7 years, I was in love like I never had been in my life, couldn't wait to get home from work to the love of life.
In 1997 while working in the ER, I started having the headache from hell,then developed left sided weak ness they Cat Scanned me and I had developed a brain bleed, I was rushed to surgery but had had a hemmorhagic stroke. They saved my life but I wound up in a wheelchair for a year.
Even after extensive therapy with which I regained the use of my legs albiet a small limp, I never did regain the use of my left hand though at all, within a year my wife started making excuses why she couldn't come home, late night meetings,phone calls late at night where she went to the bathroom to talk.
I ignored all of the signs for another year or so, until it got so bad for my own sanity, I kicked her out. I know you are thinking how does this pertain to me. Well my ex-wife started doing alcoholic behavior without drinking, and I managed to see the things I had done in former LTR's to good people.
Its like the old story, if you want to hear some one really scream, steal from a thief. I know you want to gently lead him to counseling, and yes if he has any brain cells left he would listen to you, go to rehab, get sober and have a great life. But you underestimate the insanity of the disease,most of the recovering drunks and addicts I know had to hit a personal bottom for them to experience the point where they gave there will and their life to the care of a higher power. I pray for him to find this and I pray for you also God Bless