The Freckles in Your Eyes

She didn’t know how to answer his question in a graceful way. She was taught to emit grace, speak nicely, mind her manners and not hurt people’s feelings. Do not ruffle feathers, do not be aggressive, do not speak in a way that will cause conflict or retaliation. This question…this honest, raw, pleading question was going to be hard to answer because she was out of energy to abide by the rules. She didn’t have the energy it would take to think of a graceful, kind, considerate answer. She was tired of overt-thinking responses. She was tired of not saying exactly what she felt.

They are in her car drinking tea and staring out at the frozen lake. He is waiting for an answer. Ten seconds; ten long deafening seconds have passed and she still hasn’t spoken. She supposes it is hard for people unlike her to understand how hard it can be to speak once you have already shut down; how hard it is to bother saying words that you know won’t be received how you intend them to be, no matter how hard you try to formulate them. Perhaps it is faulty communication, perhaps it is disinterest – perhaps she is just utterly hopeless.

The lake shifts and the deep crack of ice brings her back to the moment. He is still waiting. Shit.

She shifts in her seat and shoves the zipper of her puffy down jacket away from her cheek. The fucking zipper is always scratching at her face! Fuck!

She sighs and watches the cloud of her breath spread out in front of her.

“I didn’t imagine this. Before I got to know you, before I loved you, I didn’t imagine this.”

“The freckles in your eyes…the golden flecks. They used to draw me in. I used to gaze into them while I felt the wisp of your breath against my cheek and imagine what it would be like to feel your hand on the back of my neck, pulling me in closer for the long, forbidden kiss that would change everything.”

“Your cheeks…your well defined, chiselled cheek bones. I used to imagine what it would be like to wake up beside you and run my fingers over those freckled cheek bones before I kissed you good morning and made you breakfast. Breakfast would be our favourite time of the day.”

“The silver threads in your hair…I used to imagine what stories were woven into your waves, before I actually ran my hands through them. What happened in your life during the years before we crossed paths? I imagined you were a little boy who loved to play in the woods and would come home at dusk with a filthy, smiling face. You would hold out your cupped hands to show your mother a slimy, muddy toad that you had jammed in your pocket earlier in the day and saved to show her. I imagined you always wanted to make her proud.”

“Your smile…your huge, joyous smile. I used to imagine it meant something about me. I used to imagine the feel of it growing against my cheek as we slow danced in my living room to the latest Norah Jones CD, or maybe even something ridiculously remarkable like James Moody’s, “Moody’s Mood For Love”. That song….the things it does to me. It makes me weightless – like your smile once did.”

“You…the you I imagined, the you that I wanted you to be, the you that you were in fleeting moments, did things to my heart and to my soul that make right now, this moment, unbearably suffocating. If I had the energy I would be smashing on the windows trying to break out of here and run as fast as I could away from this moment. I would run until I only had one ounce of breath left, and was forced to suck some fresh life into my lungs. Some air that didn’t sting! Some godforsaken air that didn’t feel like cement! But I don’t have the energy. It is exhausting for me to say even these few words.”

“What’s the matter?

Everything.

Nothing.

I don’t know.

You.

Me.

Us.”

“The things that I imagined are hurtful. The things that I remember are hurtful. The things you did and didn’t do, the things I did and didn’t do, the moments we shared and the ones we didn’t tear at my heart every day until I want to rip it out of my chest and throw it across the room.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Everything. I don’t know.”

He is staring at her, blankly. What is he thinking? Does he think she’s crazy? She knows she sounds crazy. She feels crazy.

She looks back at the lake.

The sun is going down and adding a glint to the crusted snow. It burns her eyes and they begin to tear.

There is a pink hue to the sky. Watermelon skies, as she likes to call them. Pink skies are her favorite. They make her body feel like it is springing back to life. They bring her childish joy. Like his smile used to.

She starts the car and backs away from the lake; the sound of the crusty snow beneath the tires deafening in relation to the silence in the front seat. He hasn’t said a word.

Wordless; the drive home is wordless.

She pulls into the driveway and turns off the ignition. They sit.

He turns and looks at her, “Are you coming in?”

“Give me a few minutes.”

She watches him go inside, as she leans her head back against the headrest. A tear escapes her right eye and freezes as it rolls down her cheek.

She reclines the seat, and pulls the scratchy jacket up against her face.

Shes closes her eyes.

She is too tired to move.

Tea Parties and Wedding Veils

As a young girl, you romanticized love. You pulled the curtain panel over your hair and pretended it was a wedding veil and practiced walking down the aisle. When you pictured your groom standing before you it was in a church, in front a few hundred people waiting to see you seal your love with vows and a ring by a minister of a religion you didn’t even believe in. When you looked at the groom in front of you, you liked to believe that his eyes were misty from how honored and disillusioned he was that you were standing before him saying you wanted to be with him in sickness and health, for better or worse….FOREVER.

As a young girl, you romanticized parenting; you stuffed a balloon under your shirt and pretended you could feel what it would be like to carry a baby and you treated your dolls like you thought children would be cared for. You brushed their hair and changed their diapers and took them with you everywhere you went pretending to be a perfectly doting mother. Oddly the baby never made a peep. You always visualized a happy family made up of a husband and wife and a child.

As an adult, the romanticism fades a bit and you realize that you definitely want the children but you want to feel them grow inside of you. You want to push them on the swings, cuddle them, bathe them, rock them and sing them to sleep. You want to hold their little hands, splash in puddles, teach them to swim, wipe their tears and kiss scraped knees. You want to watch them grow up and see who they become. You want the real thing.

You still want the partner but you aren’t as sure that the wedding is required. You want the love and the companionship and the loyalty but you aren’t even sure you can recognize the right partner after the ones you thought were right before turned out to be so very, very wrong. You look back and don’t want to believe that the love you waited to love could grow for people who didn’t want to receive it. But you didn’t have a choice. We don’t choose who deserves our feelings or where to plant them or when to grow them or when to pull at the dead, dry weeds. Love chooses.

Romanticism may not have a place in adulthood. Adulthood is a time of logic with snippets of awe and heartache mixed in. Love doesn’t always equal marriage or partnership. Babies don’t always equal marriage or partnership. Love can exist all on its own and it can be beautiful or it can tear a hole in you that you fear will leave you a little bit damaged forever. But it is real; the love of a child or the love of a person is very real.

Love is not a fairy tale. Love may not always be romantic or healthy because love is real. Love exists.  Love permeates everything. Love makes you come alive – romantic or not.

When I Feel the Rain

The rain came today. The way it does this time of year. It catches you off guard even though you know full well it’s coming. It comes every year. This year is no different from the years before or the years still to come. The years make no difference to the rain.

When the rain comes I listen closely. I can hear the individual drops as they hit the ground. I can feel each one with its own purpose and its own strength fighting to be heard over the other. The drops begin to blend and become louder as they form the stream that gains momentum and volume until it finds a place to come to rest. Tonight the roar of the stream has rested on you.

When the rain comes I often close my eyes and try to picture your face. It is different each time depending on where my journey has taken me since I last saw you. I have missed looking into your eyes. Sometimes when I look really closely I can see myself in them. Tonight your eyes are big, and brown and hopeful under a wisp of bangs you hide beneath. I don’t know why you hide your eyes…they really are beautiful.

Tonight your hair is deep and dark like your favorite chocolate…warm and inviting; inviting me to run my hands through it. You keep it long because you love when the wind blows and swirls the pieces around your face. It makes you feel free. I like to think you got that from me…the love and desire of the lightness of freedom.

When the rain comes I often close my eyes and think about what you are like. The way you love to curl up in your favorite chair and read your books and how you love to sing in the shower, but quietly so no one can hear. You don’t know I can hear so you don’t know how much I love to listen to you love to sing.

When the rain comes I often close my eyes and try to feel what it would feel like to wrap you in my arms and breathe in the smell of you. Sometimes I forget how much I have missed that smell. Sometimes when it rains I feel like you are right beside me and I am running my fingers over yours to soothe you because sometimes the roar of the stream can be so deafening it scares you.

Tonight I am remembering how I saw you before and am seeing how you’ve changed as I’ve changed; how you’ve grown as I’ve grown.

The rain came today. When the rain comes, I listen closely. When the rain comes, I think of you.

Take My Hand

I grew up in a tiny neighbourhood of semi-detached homes. The area was swarming with kids my age, partly due to the elementary school in my backyard. It doesn’t seem to be like that anymore. Parenting styles were different too…matching a time that seemed more carefree and trusting. They didn’t live in fear like they do now; fear of kidnapping, rape, bullying, abuse. Our mothers used to wake us up, feed us breakfast and shove us out the door with a brown lunch bag telling us to be home at dusk. You could hear the vacuums starting as you begrudgingly trudged down the gravel driveway looking for company on your unplanned adventure. We had to think of things to do. Outside.

This, is where the quest for adventure began.

I had a friend that lived a kilometer away, up a very large hill, and back in the woods. At eight years old I used to fill my backpack with things for the day, put on my little canvas running shoes and hike up to her house. We weren’t your average Barbie doll girls. I would meet her at the front door and she would come out with her backpack and we would set of into the bush behind her house. We spent hours out there walking around, following the creek wherever it would take us, challenging each other to run through the giant culvert that emptied across the street from her house…just so we could say we made it. One winter day as we tried to cross the stream by balancing across a fallen tree, I slipped and fell in. I remember crying the whole way back to the house, alone, not because I was afraid of what had just happened but because I was cold and angry that had missed out on the rest of the fun.

These were elementary school days spent together with friends, riding our BMX bikes from dawn to dusk, playing in parks, swimming in dirty ponds, and living our lives in ways that were too big for our little bodies to hold on to. To let the joy out we had to scream, and giggle and laugh until our bellies hurt. These moments somehow got lost in the highschool and college years. At some point, I forgot what it felt like to live.  These are the days I had longed to recreate for a while…I just didn’t know what was missing. That is, until a few years ago when I met someone who helped change the way I see the world around me.

I was in a bad way and had spiralled quickly into a place that left me feeling disconnected. I lacked the energy and ability to see the beauty in anything at all. There I was, sad and lost and unknowingly looking for a hand. He too was in a bad way. He was sad and lost and knowingly searching for a lifeline.  We grabbed on tightly to one another and began a slow journey out of a time that was trying desperately to bury us. Day by day, we took another step away from that hideous place and into an adventure that changed my life.

This wasn’t a big cross-country road trip or a series of site-seeing vacations where some monumental thing or a-ha moment happened…rather a series of moments during our time together that all happened out in nature. The connection back to nature that I had been missing and longing for without knowing it. In these moments, the damage of the disconnect came to the surface and started to repair itself.

There was the time we sat on a bench at the waterfront and watched the sun setting over the water. The night we sat in the grass at the park at night, under it’s largest tree and got eaten alive by mosquitoes until the rain began to pour in sheets so thick we could barely find our way back to our cars. The night we bundled up in our parkas, drank coffee and walked in the bush while nickle-sized snowflakes melted on our warm cheeks. The day he told me to dress warm and picked me up during a thunderstorm. We stood in the bush along a stream and let the water soak us right through. We weren’t cold. We let the water stream down our faces and held our hands out until we could feel each individual drop hit our palms.

I began to come back to life. I asked him to meet me in the park at midnight. I took off my high heels and walked barefoot with my party dress blowing behind me. I didn’t feel the cold because I was warm with the energy of the moon and the moment. He took me to waterfalls and cliffs and pebble beaches. We hiked from day-to-night and I didn’t once complain because I felt at home out there. I begged him one night to let loose (imagine!) and join me in the bay in mid October when I had kicked off my shoes, rolled up my pants and waded in. He didn’t join me but he met me back on the shore where we sat on the damp, cool sand and stared at the most magnificent cluster of stars I had ever seen.

When I had gotten even braver I had started to venture out on my own. I would set off into the bush to fill my thirst for nature and to prove to myself that I was okay out in the world on my own two feet. That I was now in a place where I didn’t need a hand, but I really liked having his. I skied the trails at night alone, without my headlamp to show nature that I trusted her and myself to make it out should the light ever die on me mid-journey. I drove an hour to the beach just to stare at the water and listen to the sound of the waves. I took a drive up north to various Provincial Parks and sat on a bench in a cove staring at a mountain that I couldn’t pry my eyes away from. There is something about a mountain that reminds you how small you really are in the grand scheme of things…when you become so self-absorbed that you forget there is more to the world than your worries and pain.

So I started small with sand, and grass, and trees, and cliffs and I eventually graduated to mountains. I didn’t see the progression then but it is becoming clearer to me now. Things get better. I’m in the mountain phase. I know this because my instincts have been pulling me there for months. There is something more I have to do.

So to you, my friend who took hold of my limp hand and invited me to share your path, I thank you. I don’t know if I would be here if it wasn’t for you. Through the good and the bad, I have become stronger. I have reconnected with myself and I have reconnected with nature because she is part of who I am. She always was. I lost her and you helped me find her. I’m sorry that you aren’t here to share this journey anymore but I am thankful for our time. Thank you for guiding me back to myself. Thank you for guiding me home.

Knowing When toWalk Away from Unrequited Love

As posted on TinyBuddha.com   http://tinybuddha.com/blog/knowing-when-to-walk-away-from-unrequited-love/ by Kelly Reynolds (moi)

“Love does not obey our expectations; it obeys our intentions.” ~Lloyd Strom

To say that love hasn’t obeyed my expectations would be the understatement of the century.

I have not been lucky in love. I’ve been blessed with some amazing moments over the years, but somehow have managed to choose partners who did not want what I wanted, did not feel what I felt, and did not want to walk beside me into a future together.

I have really had to sit with this and try and figure out what part of this was my doing, and how to change it, because this year I once again chose a partner who was not walking with me. Except this time not only was he not walking with me but he was subtly trying to kick my feet from under me every chance he got.

I once again entered into a relationship desperate to find love and instead found a beautiful disaster. Love is a blessing, this we know. Unrequited love is toxic, and it can eat you alive.

Falling in love can be a slippery slope, regardless of any protective barriers we may have built. It can ease in like a light a mist that settles itself beautifully over your life, or it can blindside you.

Often we fall in love with a person before we have fully gotten to know them. By this point it’s too late—you’ve already stretched your heart for someone capable of bruising it. This is what love requires: utmost vulnerability and trust. Hopes and expectations rise along with the awareness that it can slip away.

I suggest we do our best to live in the moment. Love is elastic. It stretches and retracts and changes shape constantly. It is very uncertain. One day you are over the moon and the next disillusioned.

The elastic can break. You can re-tie it, but there is now a knot. Suddenly that perfect perception of the other person is a little bit tainted. Something rocked the pedestal. Sometimes we can recover from this, sometimes we can’t. 

Loyalty and commitment teach us that we are not to walk away from people that we love. Buddhism teaches us to love without expectation. There are a lot of belief systems about love and I question them often. If your love is shared and you are both happy I assume you wouldn’t have to question love at all.

But if your relationship, be it friendship or romantic love, is unbalanced and one person is hurting, how much is enough? How many pieces are supposed to break and how damaged can we allow ourselves to get before we throw these belief systems out the window and accept that this type of love isn’t healthy?

How do we do what is best for ourselves without damaging the heart and mind of someone else in the process?

Love and relationships require work and responsibility. We have to learn when to stretch and when to break.

For those of you who have been blessed to find a romantic love that is equally shared, I truly admire this and I have set the intention to find it one day. I think it all starts with being aware, open, and ready.

For a long time I didn’t believe I would find love so I subconsciously chose partners who I knew would be a challenge. I am no longer interested in this challenge. I told myself when my last relationship failed that I would never put myself in a situation where I didn’t know where I stood in someone’s life again; where I felt unsteady and unloved.

Unfortunately I did it again this year and I can promise you that it was the last time. I now know what I would like my relationship with my future partner to feel like, and that is the first step towards being open to receiving this gift. Love is a gift.

I have been tested often this year and with this came the opportunity to learn lessons. I have lived my life openly. I have experienced love and trusted the process. I fell in love, watched it grow, watched it change, and watched it fall apart.

I felt the pain, and still continue to recover from it. My heart is healing and that is a slow process, but it was necessary to hurt to have learned what I learned. For this I am grateful. I’m also grateful to my friends and family who helped me to pick up the pieces when I didn’t have the energy to do it alone.

8 things I have learned about relationships so far:

1. If there is a feeling better than love, I have not felt it. Take the risk and dive in with everything you have.

2. Enjoy the good times together as they are happening and be grateful for them.

3. Stay out of the future and in the moment. Now is certain.

4. Protect both your heart and your partner’s, whether the love is still there or not. We are human and we deserve kindness. We don’t need to add to the burdens we already carry by hurting others. Trust me, it doesn’t make thing better.

5. If your relationship starts to crumble, know when to put it down and let it be. Don’t grind it into dust.

6. You cannot continue to give to another person when you are not at your best; when you are so broken, so beaten down that you have no energy left. When talking has failed and words no longer have meaning, this is when you know it is over. When you feel like this, you have to do what is best for the relationship and for each other and wave the white flag to avoid further damage.

7. Some things just won’t work, no matter how badly we wish they would. Sometimes the match that felt so right just isn’t. Please don’t do more damage to your heart by trying to fix something that has past its expiration date. It will leave you raw.

8. It is okay to walk away from something that hurts you. It doesn’t require blame or justification. It just requires you to stop fanning the flames. You will find love again, and next time it will feel better.

Life isn’t easy. Some things build us up and some tear us down. Our hearts expand and break and rebuild—repeatedly. We are constantly learning and changing and growing. If in love you find yourself in a sticky situation like I was, please stop picking at scabs.

Nothing good has ever come from this. Stop the cycle, and let your heart heal so you can find pure love. Surround yourself with loving relationships. Something beautiful is out there waiting for you. If you feel it on the inside, you’ll find it out there.

I Carry Your Heart With Me

Dear Stranger,

I have some things I would finally like to say to you.

It has been a while since we have talked. I guess it’s because (for one of many reasons), we’ve needed this time to come full circle. You know the circle I speak of… two people meet, join together, develop a friendship, develop a bond, become lovers, fall in love, fall into disillusion, fall apart…break apart. It is quite an emotional ride. Anyone that says it is easy to pick up the pieces after is lying…especially to themselves.

I know I am a hypocrite. I know that I preach about the importance of words but when push comes to shove, I shove them down. I’ve learned my lesson so let me use my words now to be clear, although you won’t hear them. Let me try to help you understand now, although you won’t.

I refuse to use my words to guilt you, to cause you pain, to make you question yourself, to hurt you, to belittle you or make you feel anything less than valued. If I start to open my mouth and I feel that a word like this might slip out, I shut it. I refuse to have you feel badly or have you feel badly for me. If I start to feel a tear develop or my chest get heavy as a result of something you have said or done, or did not do but I wished you had, I change the subject or look away. I will not cry, I will not yell. You don’t deserve to feel badly by my hand just like I don’t deserve to feel badly by yours.

So all of those times that you asked me what was wrong, or I went quiet and it upset you….one of these reasons applies. To explain to you how I felt would have been to admit that I was hurt by one of your actions or inactions which would have caused you to want to defend yourself. I don’t want you to ever feel you have to defend yourself. I want you to always feel free to be exactly who you are. The person I fell in love with through all of the ups and downs. The person I fell in love with at his lowest point. The person I refused to judge even when judgement would have been justified. That person was real. That person was honest and vulnerable and respectful. That is the person I hoped you would always be.

So you see, in the quiet times I wasn’t trying to tear us apart…I was trying to keep us together in the only way I knew and know how. I was trying my best. I failed horribly, but my intentions weren’t malicious. Your response, however was. You purposely used your words to cause me pain, to make me feel small, unloved, and guilty. It worked. But I cannot accept this. This isn’t the reason why I walked away, but it is the reason I didn’t come back. I know you don’t understand that, but one day you will. One day.

So in this time that it has taken for us to come full circle, I have tried to pick up the pieces of a heart that used to love you so purely. A heart that still crushes my chest so badly on days spent missing you, that it hurts to breathe. A heart that so badly just wanted to be held in your gentle hands forever. A heart that would have given anything not to have been abused. You dropped it, but I picked it up. I will take care of it now. And now that your words have stopped breaking it, it has a chance to heal.

And even though I hurt and I heal, I still believe that some things were real and I try to make sense of the fallout. Of the person that doesn’t jive with who I knew. So what I say doesn’t always make sense to others or to myself. Some people might think that I’m crazy for feeling this way after picking me up fall after fall the past two years, and I question my reasoning too, but it must be said because it is my turn to be vulnerable regardless of the consequences.

I still maintain that if tomorrow I had the chance to relive that night with you, cross-legged in the rain, under the biggest tree in the park…I would. If we could start all over again on that boardwalk at sunset, I would. If we could climb that mountain, hike that trail, canoe that lake or take that road-trip again…I would. If only we could be silent. If I could lay with my head on your chest and listen to your heart beat, run my hands through your hair to put you to sleep or stare into that vulnerable speck in your eye again, I would. Silently, so words couldn’t break the moment.

So, here we are at the peak of communication breakdown where words have failed us and are no longer spoken or written. Where it has all fallen apart and we are now strangers. Here I am, still missing you to death and we are both to blame. You for too many words, and I for not enough. Shame on us.

But I still have my memories. And when they start to fade away, so will my love. But for now, when I miss you I am going to close my eyes  and breathe and remember that even though you are far away, and you are not here…you are not gone because….. I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart. (e.e. cummings).

~Kelly