hello i miss my boyfriend i miss being called baby and knowing there is someone who is always happy when they see a text from me and i miss a person being excited for me to come over and missing me and not being afraid to love me and i miss feeling safe and i miss feeling safe enough to express myself when i DON’T feel safe and i miss being touched and making someone excited, hugs and fingers through my hair, and i miss feeling beautiful and smart and special and worthy and i miss being listened to and supported and knowing who to turn to, always, i miss compassion and understanding not feeling like too much all the time, i miss being loved at the bottom of everything
there were also the binoculars, which we bought the week before so he could show me far away things- little birds, animals, signs of civilization on long hikes- that i never seem to see properly. we lost it when coming home from a birthday party. it seems to have just disappeared, and it broke my heart because it made him so sad. little things make him sad like this, and it always seems like he is on the verge of being sad, a tiny failure away from tipping to the other side. things that made him happy don’t seem to have the same effect- at best, they keep him steadily on the edge. when he’s sad already, they don’t make a difference at all. i wonder what it’s like to love a man who is not depressed, to love someone and see it make a tangible difference, to pour this love back and forth between each other and grow from it. i don’t know if that means i wonder what its like to be loved back at all.
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.
