There is a haunting dissonance you feel when writing about your personal trauma through the spyglass of a poem.
Nothing is as real as it should be. Nothing is as solid, or simple.
It’s like cutting a self-healing mat, over and over and over. It’s like brushing up against a wasp’s nest made of tacks and thorns, but never feeling the sting.
It’s like saying goodbye to someone long gone.
I don’t know if it helps me to process what has happened in my yesterdays, or if it just gives me some form of solace at the lectern of life. But it does something.
And that’s more than I was doing on my own.
Three years, this September, I will have been in therapy with a man just like me, while nothing at all like me. It’s a paradox of shouldn’ts, but it works, somehow. I try not to look too closely at why, in fear of unraveling the intrusive.
I have darkness in my rearview. A cloud of despair and desolation enumerates a sallow sorrow that only time could pretend to heal. And there has been time. Years. Decades. And the pain of betrayal’s sting is just as sweet and sour as it was all those mornings ago.
So I write.
I write to remember, and I write to forget.
I write.
Until it feels a little less wrong.
