Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
My smallest person said to me yesterday, “If my life is a dream, then this is a really long night.”
I keep waiting to wake up from my really long night. Or to wake up and not feel that my heart has been ripped from my chest. Grief is an inconvenient emotion. No one really wants to hear about someone else’s pain – not real, raw, just-make-it-stop pain. It’s unsociable, doesn’t want to be tamed. I once watched my sister, the bravest person I know, cry for two hours while she waited for pain medication. For two hours, I held her hand and said relief was coming soon. But I do not know how far away soon is for me.
Every day my heart is a little more tattered. One of my queeny friends used to tell me, “Honey, you don’t just wear your heart on your sleeve; you wear ALL your internal organs on your sleeve.” So sometimes now I think of my large intestine dripping its disgusting contents down my arm. I wish I were otherwise, but I am not. I have always been thus.
I blame my parents. They love me so much and have for so long that I find it incomprehensible he could not. I come from a long line of people who love fierce and forever. When I said, “with my body I thee worship”, I meant it. I am sorry he didn’t know some of that worship would be the times when my body was taken up with little people. How did he not know I loved him, underneath the daily stupidity?
Nearly every night now feels like the first night of the rest of a really long life I never imagined, a dream without a waking: the first night he told me about her, the first night after I asked him to move out, the first night that the children were not with me. I am still waiting for the first night I do not miss him.
Already I miss the security of being with him. And not in some plain vanilla (though vanilla is the most complex of flavours) sort of way. Always, I was so open. Again, I think my parents warped me. The childhood lesson I took from my mother’s extensive lingerie collection and the naughty things I found in the back of my parents’ closet was, once married, you were free to get your kink on. Even in a good Lutheran home. I have been with him in ways that still amaze me. To be that vulnerable ever again terrifies me. But I still want to be turned inside out by sex. I have loved being so totally inside my body, feeling so totally myself yet not. I want that again.
He has pushed me out of his heart ad given his body to someone else. They tell me it happens all the time. But my heart is still beating outside its bony cage, and my internal organs are an unsightly mess here on my sleeve. I want nothing more than not to want him. To unlove him, as I have loved him, fierce and forever.
My twitter is @StedgeTanya.