In my desire for peak experiences maybe that's what I manifest for myself, instead of a long-lasting mediocrity, or hanging onto a faded shadow of what was once a past joy, but unsustainable, as most do.
Still, I miss my marriage, or I miss the ideal of marriage, the construct of permanence, an inviolate safety & sanctuary I'd thought I'd had and have lost through no fault of my own. I bet my emotional bank on my wife, a person who'd oathed by the Gods to keep troth with me, and it didn't work out. It was fucking crushing at a level I'd never experienced before. If after that a divorcé never lost hesitancy, or remained boundaried, or stayed emotionally guarded for the rest of their life, no one could blame them from learning those safeties from their deeply hurtful experience.
What is enough? What is needed? Are those wants just larger fears and shortcomings of self that actually have nothing to do with the other person, or are those needs real? And is my happiness with who I am a strength, or does my self-satisfaction rob me of the ability to change? It's not that I don't change, but my whole life I've changed so glacially, with consideration & care at such a slowly studied degree that my self-love will allow. If that change doesn't come at a rate or time that another person wants me to change, then what does that cost me or protect me from? But if I change for someone else, do I then become someone better or worse, or just someone different, someone less recognizable, a face in the mirror that has kept another's love but in a sacrificial ratio lost self-love, and possibly one's own center?
My writer's logic allows me to understand, to frame it in a way that gives it context, but my unquenchable romanticism, the feelings themselves, break my heart.
Again.
And again.
And I write about it, again, like an eternal return, a fire that never dies, a burning ship, a battle that is instead a brutally wanted kiss.
# # #
[for K and the 68 Mondays.]
# # #
While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.
