I feel like it's been a while since I was this deep in the ocean, but time doesn't have much of a meaning here, so maybe that's an illusion of brain chemistry. Or maybe that's what time is.
Either way. I digress.

I'm deep in the waves and it's horrifying and comforting like it always is. It always feels the same, like giving up and going home at the same time.

The waves taste never taste like salt water. They taste like unresolved fights and loss and every disappointment I was ever made to swallow.

Maybe I am a bird, maybe like Jenny, God or whoever or whatever heard my prayers and gave me wings so I could fly far far away. But it isn't a permanent gift. They wear out, like a metaphor made of wax, and I fall back down and my feathers become scales to weigh out my failures every time.

Maybe it is partially because I suspect that this is the only thing I've ever really loved. Not me. Not a chimera in my dreams that wears a dozen, a hundred different faces reminding me of what I once had or could have had, if only I were better or stronger. The depth and madness and the way the sound echoes in the waves from all the ways I have been transformed into something rich and strange.

I wonder how it feels to be fit for a Hans Christian Anderson fairytale, to have one place in your life where you didn't feel like you were walking on knives. To be able to chose that pain instead of it just being the reality.

I know I'll not live rolling in the undertow forever. I know I'll rise like bubbles to the foam and reflected sunshine again. But for now I'll close my eyes in the deep and dark and pretend the salt water I feel on my face is the spray of the sea.

Candy

I've worked so hard to forgive myself. I promised myself that I would never regret, never say I was sorry.

I'd give almost anything for your happiness to pour down like champagne on a pyramid of glasses--almost anything, I'd gladly pay. But where I draw the line, what I cannot afford, is my own happiness washed away with the bubbles, you see.

It's difficult. The months bled away and every time I'd see you, your eyes would have that look--that wounded look, like there's the feast of the whole world before us but all you can see is me, representing the fallen souffle of our relationship. I couldn't bear it.

I couldn't bear that I was doing everything to keep myself alive and all you saw was me leaving you.

And I did. I did walk away. But not from you. 

I walked away from the spun sugar facade of the life I worked so hard to want with you. The chocolate dipped nothingness I was offered.

The empty cake of promises, iced with time that did nothing to fill the emptiness in me.

The hunger that burned in me while I tried to fight my other demons while feasting on crumbs.

I try to look back at that time and all lessons it taught me. I try to be at peace with how I grew.

But that time is gone for me. I think, I have so much to sort through, so many bad habits, so many things I do that I think I am wrong for, so many things I wish I could unlearn. 

I know in my marrow, in my soul, in my heart that I will never be unloved. 

But what if I am never a mother? What if I never have the life I was building?

Those are the knuckle tattoos I told you wanted after all, that you dismissed. Wife. Mama. I guess I told you too many times that I never liked babies. I guess that's true.

I don't like babies. I don't like people either, but I love them very easily. Even more when they're mine. And you threw it in my face, saying you would have asked me, you would have raised our family. A tiny part of me still says, then why didn't he? It's not like you didn't ask--wait, is that what you did wrong? You asked him?

But if I had to ask, over and over, maybe it was never meant to be. Not us. ....maybe it's never what I am meant to have, for me.

Maybe that's the real lesson. To be content with what I can have.

I worried after I left that I had broken your heart. I worried about the effect it would have on your future. When you ended up with someone else, I could just say, "Oh, I'm glad, I'm glad!" But it seems it's more complicated than that. Even after that, you ask me not to bring my new fella, asking clearly without saying I should not. 

I didn't have the heart to say the truth, the spite to say, which one?

We said goodbye a year ago, but maybe I needed this time, too, to say farewell. Maybe this is the last step.

It's no small thing to feel loved the way I do. I think one of these is even for keeps, even if I'll never be a missus, even if we never share a home since he's made one so long term with someone else, (though that's hardly a detraction. The parts of him that belong to her are no less dear, and neither is she). 

But still. There's no top tier, coated in buttercream in the freezer for this anniversary. I'll savor these words without the benefit of sugar to help the medicine go down. I haven't much of a sweet tooth anyway.

I'll never ever again feel that terrible weight of longing for confirmation that never comes.

I'll never ever ask someone to give up their dreams or compromise their wants or to wait for the life they want to start.

I will never ever let anyone live on maybe.

I'll never ever again ask a question I don't already know the answer to, even if it means it's never my turn. 

Like Sugar Cane says, I'll never settle for the fuzzy end of the lollipop again.

I've written the words so many times. But I am whole. I am a bird and a fish and a beating heart.

I'll never be alone.

I'll never be unloved.

Everything else really is icing.

And that has to be enough.