To establish some kind of narrative order, I’ve been going through old notes/writing from the last few years… much of what I wrote then was journaling, or lines from songs or prayers that made a particular kind of painful sense. The following was written sitting at a friend’s kitchen table on Vashon Island, Thanksgiving week 2009, waiting for his ferry to dock and the knock on the door,  narcotic in my anticipation.The children and I had stayed at the beach house earlier that year when M was Hawaii with his wife and kids, trying to see if they could right their situation. I needed to get mine somewhere, anywhere, for a few days, just to stay in motion. I remember that the cherry trees on his street were in incredible bloom that spring, and how much even the sight of a single blossom on pavement somewhere else in the city felt piercing- I was still new to the feeling of everything reminding me, a phase that– though not past– has lessened mightily. Or maybe I have grown in my ability to be past the hurt and (as my yoga teachers would say “the story”) into the day that is, the big universal love.

The last time I was here, at this table, the tide was out and I ran mercilessly on the wet sand, over logs and ahead of my children, hoping they’d never be stuck the way I was stuck, knowing it would happen to them someday too, this beautiful bloom, this truncated flower, this hopeless longing, the veritas of being human, of having a heart. I am back at the table now, and mirable dictu, his divorce has happened, and I have no idea of what he suspects is true for me in this.

I –who thought  I’d done everything- have done nothing of this particular sort before, this much hushing of what wants to come out of my mouth, what messages my breath could carry if only I felt that gate open, what riches lie in the field beyond silence.

Yet. I know better. One thing these forty years have given me, slim chance to play the cards correctly, risking the immediate for dignity and a measure of patience. Never could wait well. Waiting now, waiting for I am not sure when he’ll get off ferry and come to me, what that will be like, how even as I type I am aware of this day shifting to be what I hoped for, how disappointed I’d have been if he couldn’t come, how I would have been just fine.

Puncture. Caress. Opposite poles. I am not good at this.

Non sum ego quod feuran. I am not what I was. Not what I was in April, in this room with the children and the summer just bending around the corner, what that summer would hold, the waiting, the joy and the sudden sickness. I haven’t told that story on paper yet, again waiting, feels less essential to me than this puzzle of how I got to wanting this much, solving the mystery of why I focus on the one thing in a hundred that is not in my power to solve, this dilemma that isn’t, this lesson in – again- letting things be as they may be, and learning to let them go.