naught but my bones

The Well of Grief

By David Whyte

Those who will not slip beneath

     the still surface on the well of grief

turning downward through its black water

     to the place we cannot breathe

will never know the source from which we drink,

     the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering

     the small round coins

        thrown by those who wished for something else.

 – From Where Many Rivers Meet

my words are missing. my passion is missing.  and so i borrow words from others who are more at one and transcendent with art and life and pure emotion.  i have been there...not recently...but enough to know it's inside me, or i am inside it...

i still feel at the words of others so i know my words are not too far from where i am.  

right now i'm off center.  i'm treading the water unsure if i'm going toward the surface or rock bottom.  maybe neither.  perhaps i'm sinking sideways...or rising...

my decision was made before i consciously realized.  i don't know if it's the right thing but it's done now and i can't take it back.  i don't really have any desire to take it back.  i know by how i feel that i can't be there anymore.  i can't hold my tongue or paste my face with a smile or force myself to do what they want me to do but i don't believe in doing.  they would never fire me, and i wouldn't want that on my record anyway.  they used me too much to ever ask me to leave, though they never expressed respect or value.  i was a tool, a lackey, a pawn.  i won't miss the work or the exhaustion or the aching in my bones.  i will miss the people and the art.  it's not fun for me anymore.  i don't want this to be what my life is about.  my manager said she wished i'd apply for the manager in training program but i don't want to manage that.  i'd simply be a pawn with more responsibility and more frustration and stress.  i don't want that.  i don't believe in the company anymore.  

so i leave and delve into a similar yet vastly different chapter of my story.  my greatest hope is that once i am free of the shackles of what is wrong for me, and more fully immersed in what seems right at the moment, i will find a door open to the life for which i truly ache.  

i'm doing my best, which never seems quite good enough.  but hopefully someday it will be enough.  

perhaps i should get rid of my car.  it's a piece of junk and it keeps breaking in the stupidest and most expensive ways.  but i'm too dependent on my car.  i need a car.  i just really wish it would stop costing so much.  just when i think i'm finally getting on top of things, something else breaks and i'm swamped again.

i want to cry from exhaustion and heartbreak and fear.  grief, that deep grief spoken of in the poem is washing me away and i don't know how to stop it.  so i let it flood.  it is part of the cleansing, part of the healing, part of the transformation i desperately need right now.  i don't want to be me anymore.  not the me that i've become.  i want to be some other me, the future me i haven't met yet.  i need her strength and faith and confidence.  i need her assurance that things are going to get better and i won't be stuck in this me forever.  i don't like the me i am right now.  she's not someone i ever wanted to be...but it seems that she is somehow necessary to that me i will be.  this me is tired and aching all the time; she's antisocial and grouchy; she's scarred and surviving.  i expect more than that from her but she has very little to offer right now.  i'm worn and weary through the bones.  i want to go home.