You Get Knocked Down and Will Yourself to Rise Again

Wading Deeply in Shallow Waters

A long dormant hunger was awakened when we talked into the hushed hours of overnight. Thrilling exchanges about the spot where the mind and body blend, the science of religion, and the multi-faceted nature of stimulation.

You built a fire of books and mysteries and kindnesses that made me melt and allowed me to reconstruct again and again. I placed my curves in your concave spaces and everything seemed to fit.

I imbued you with magic and meaning and moonlight and messages and mending. I allowed myself to believe that you understood—that you might even have the ability to heal me or that you even should.

It wasn’t exactly a lie you told. Sprinkled with truth, you fed me enough to give my imagination fuel and for me to believe I would eventually feast on a bounty.

Then nearly imperceptibly, foiled only by my hypervigilant watch, you began to starve me. The feedings became slowly more inconsistent until I often found myself all but begging for food. When it was only crumbs you had to offer, I had no choice but to feed on my own fat and muscle.

Layers of distance and separation and familial duty created a wall I could not transgress to more closely inspect the little secret slices of your self that you shared in measured and bewildering increments. Snapshots of sleeping children in a car on a long drive. Your head on your pillow at the end of the day. A meal your hands made. A sun ripened tomato from your garden placed on a kitchen counter I would never stand before.

“I’m too much. I’m a gaping hole of want,” I would worry aloud.

“You’re not,” you would say. And still, week by week, just as you’d awakened the self that slept deep inside me, you now put me to sleep part by part. The bit that curiously questioned in order to know you more deeply, the part that reached across the bed with passion, the other bit that wished to find the intersection between our worlds.

And then you let me leave you.

This full moon seems to have lasted forever. A large rectangle of light bathes the spot of the bed where you once slept as you came and went. Now that you are no longer here, I can finally see you clearly. And more confidently than ever, I see my Self, never to be laid to rest again.

~Kim Becomes Light, 2018