Hello, old friend. It’s been five months and everything has changed if you look close. From afar you would still think it’s the same story on a different day. I promise I am so different I don’t know who I see anymore.

I’ve been distracted, or removed from myself. I left a relationship that died two years ago but I was too blind and too assumptive to let it rest. This is the new version of me. I am still the same writer, out of practice, less verbose but more true. If every time I come back I am a little bit more true I cannot ask more of my self.

I made a mistake that taught me you can’t ask more than what others capable of giving so instead of talking in riddles let’s talk in heartbreak. In a very uncharacteristic move I cut the poison out. I blocked, I deleted, I erased his present existence from my life and now he may as well be dead. If you were listening you would know that death is the inability to create a new memory with another. This death was slow and painful. I watched him afraid to love me and afraid to leave me. So I did the reasonable thing, the responsible thing. The thing that didn’t feel good at the time, but moves me forward. I walked.

MB, I once left you for my past. I left you for a man I thought I loved so I wouldn’t regret him. This is a common mistake for me. I never walk out on a new love for another new love. I walk out on new love for a past love that I am so nostalgically hell bent on breathing life back into, like a nightmare-ish do-over, maybe to prove to myself that I am not a love mistake. You cannot put a mistake on top of another mistake.

I don’t recall how it came to be that each day you taught me how to un-love you I’d hazard a guess it was through your harmful actions and selfish choices. I was too busy playing mea culpa on the past I closed my eyes, breathed and said, yes, this is love. I had to prove to you that I had changed that I could love you greatly and we could be what we should have always been, if we both weren’t fucked up at the wrong time. Time doesn’t want to hear excuses. It only asks if you’re good now. If you are ready now. And if logic and reason were enough to balm my heartache I wouldn’t be talking into an abyss. I hate that I find myself here because I have nowhere else to turn. I don’t want to write from pain. I want to write from joy, inspiration, and creation. Not because the world doesn’t make sense.

I fucking hate growth. It has to be this way to be better for me, because I can’t care about you, MB.

There’s a room in Melbourne where you can pay $60 to break a box of ceramics. I was filled with unmanageable rage. Rage I couldn’t direct so I broke some shit and it helped. Under the emotion, anger, that everyone says hides something else I found acceptance. Life hack- let the love fade slow so you grieve whilst you’re amongst it. I should be thankful you hurt me slow and killed my love because now I am here and there’s no strong emotion in it. I don’t want to be grateful, I want to be less stupid. To cut my losses when they’re in front of me. To not make the same mistake. There’s pages of poems I wrote all on theme. Love lost. The broken plate. A man I thought I loved once- I loved a version of him that never came back, told me a story about how he cheated on his first girlfriend and it was never the same even though she took him back. Running to his mother she advised him, it’s a broken plate. You can’t put it back together. I hated her analogy I thought it was reductionist. But maybe it’s the same as an inspirational mug quote. It’s dumb and true. I think I also hated it because I went back to this man to fix our own version of the broken plate and if I wasn’t lying to myself I would have said, we are a broken plate and can’t love each other the same anymore. He taught me a lot but I know the lesson has only just come through. SJ, don’t spin the plates. Don’t break the plate. Ok, I got it. So universe, give me a new boyfriend so I can try again.

I have never felt more untangled from my past. Releasing all this old beaten up love. The garden of thorns bloomed and then began to wilt. The roses are preparing for their winter repose. I knew I had changed, the roses around me were changing too, the roses were the worst of it all, taunting me, asking if you’re so different why are you here asking the same questions of us? So the hand is forced, towards radical change. You can’t be a new person in an old circumstance.  There’s no air in it. You’ll suffocate yourself. Be brave my little heroine. Be brave.

Pause. I am currently also thinking, people don’t change. Including me. That all we can do is bring out our best characteristics and fight against our flaws. Perhaps I am fundamentally the same but instead of being the worst version of me. I am cultivating the best version of me. And now it is a game of patience. I wonder if this is surrender, letting it play out.

So, to firsts and change and poetry.

To MB

Remember how I loved you

When it turns to an unused destiny

When the heart choses

Fate submits

You control the future

My captain of industry

Steered by the failures

of my promises passed

PAST.

You refuse to live there

Not like me

Rewriting history

Always nostalgic

or maybe just

moment blind,

Present unaware.

Move forward

My eternal optimist

“i.love.you.

Ok.”

Remember? The noose?

I hope you carry that memory with you forever

and hang yourself with it too.

Feb 2020

Medusa didn’t mean it

“stand still”

I am,

still standing.

Look at us babe
Stone statues of our former selves
in ruins.

My father, a deity
leaves me a gift
a poison dowry.

Medusa, me, I
turned you into this horror

There:

There is the ugliness that isolates me
I can look at my own reflection.

Kiss my snakes
learn to live
through my own undoing.

But not you, my love.
I can’t look at you,
I can’t stand the sight of my blood cursed legacy.

I will love you so greatly
I fear I wont find myself.
That you,
you will have the power to go.
And I will
remnants of dust in a mirror.

Love is,

Commitment that ends in you leaving.
My father the deity
has failed to protect me.

You can’t leave,
you’re stone.
you can’t love,

You’re stone.

            And we’re still standing.

And we might never turn back

And we might never be more

Than monuments now
to a once-upon coursing love
immemorial.

Or you can’t unsee me.

            Monster.

November 2020

Is anyone surprised this didn’t work out?

xx SJ