A month or so ago, I asked the chat for suggestions on what to write about and someone mentioned the concept of grace.
Many other fantastic suggestions were made (which I will get to, don’t worry) but today I will continue to muse on love, the concept of secular grace, ex-lovers, and their shifting meanings in our lives.
After all, we are in a retrograde.
Going backwards.
The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.
James Baldwin, duh.
I have always loved this quote because it perfectly encapsulates how I love, who I am when I let someone live in my heart.
This is what I give and hope to receive: a reprieve from the fog.
We are so often failed lovers; cowards who Love the fog, afraid to release our grip on the familiar. We cut, sever, and burn to avoid reexamining or reconsidering what we think we know.
Heartbroken, we go in search of a less offensive mirror—a gentler oracle—and we always find it, at least we always think so, at least always at first.
Francesco Alberino writes,
Our past weighs on our conscience. We protect ourselves from the past with forgetfulness, with distractions, with the displacement that renders it unconscious. But as Freud said, the unconscious is immortal.
Prompted by Alberoni’s book, I began to reflect back on past lovers this week. Men I have loved and who loved me, or claimed to.
As I did, I found my heart had shifted over the years; assuaged itself with something like grace.
Well, for the most part.
I always figured that Time + Space = grace.
I have so much proof of it.
Ex-lovers, old boyfriends, even the ones I’d never thought I’d forgive; the ones whose names I cursed seem to no longer evoke feelings of resentment. The heartbreaks I deemed insurmountable inevitably faded into tenderness, a soft landing place I never thought possible.
Some even became friends.
Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way.
Some things remain unforgivable.
Sometimes all you can do is lick your wounds and hope karma does exist, though perhaps even this belief in unpardonable acts is simply due to lack of time, like not enough of it has gone by.
It’s like that Daniel Johnston song: some things last a long time.
Maybe one day I will have even forgiven the worst one.
For now, it is strange to exist in the middle place.
That morning in April of this year is still too close.
Leaning against the kitchen counter, staring back at his absurd and irrational fears. A week of terrible e-mails. Years of spying.
A fuck you still rolling around in my mouth.
The co-existence of the certain, unavoidable softening and the lingering feelings of resentment. Every day I wake up and wonder if this is the day, the one where it all melts into a puddle at my feet, the one where he is just a man again; something fragile and foolish and worthy of grace.
Not yet.
Too much ego still standing in the way. It is the ego that blocks grace; that keeps us tethered to resentment.
Sometimes the only solace is knowing God doesn’t let him sleep
while you wait for Time to work it’s fucking magic
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