The Journey
by Mary Oliver.

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice----
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
''Mend my life!''
each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world
determined to do
the only thing you could do----
determined to save
the only life you could save.

i wrote these when i was really sad and angry at love. i'm leaving them here for you all because i feel like there is some essential feeling there that most people can relate to when they lose someone, and i'm offering them to you if you are in pain so that you know that you aren't alone in going through those tough emotions and thoughts. when it's bad, it's really bad.

if you CAN relate, i want to let you know that with time, it all fades. all of it. if you let it fade, then it will. but if you hold tight to it, the pain will always be there for you, so don't hold tight!

a meditation on the futility of loss

I don't know where to put my feelings.
I don't draw or write or make music or take photographs or make good conversation and I feel like something is ripping inside of me, but it's stupid because there is no tragedy. There is no tragedy here. Just sadness, and feeling lonely for a specific person because I love them and I'm used to them and I already missed them and asked for more time and now I'll have to miss them so much more until I don't care anymore. No tragedy. I know what will happen. My heart will recover and I will wonder why it was I ever felt so wrapped up in it before and I'll move right along into the next thing that doesn't work. Just two years ago I bitter and closed off from relationships and keeping my distance, and now look at me, all fucked up about love and relationships once again, as I knew I would be then. What the fuck have I learned? I've learned about another person and myself. Now I get to feel that sick pulling feeling inside, where the part of me, the organ grown specially to give and receive that one particular relationship love, starve, wither away and die. It can join the others, the other dead parts of me custom built to be with other people. I don't want to feel like this. I don't want to feel jaded and hopeless and afraid of the shitty dying time that I guess I'd better get used to being in for awhile. I don't want to tease apart the stranded of my life that I've woven with her, or cut them away, or worse, end up holding her dangling ends, attached to nothing. I know this is better. It's the shitty part now. I know it's better because eventually we'll be friends of a sort and all of that. friends of a sort. but I'm not ready to let it go, because it felt so good. it felt good to want to be with another person, to love another person specially, to know them and be known. I can't fucking take doing this again. but it doesn't matter. because however this feels, I will eventually get angry, and then numb, and then nothing. and then everything will be fine and i'll move on.