Plucking Petals

Your absence sits in the corner, a sulking beast that scowls.  I dare not look at it but it’s there just the same.  It’s staring at me.  Daring me to feel something I don’t want to.  Alone.  It’s a despicable word.  Empty.  Even worse.  Weren’t these supposed to be crucial elements to finding bliss?  Bliss isn’t here at the moment.  Leave a message.

The hole left where you were but aren’t now threatens to swallow me.  Sometimes I don’t want to resist it.  Sometimes I just want to dive in it headfirst and abandon the silence that becomes a screaming mockery in this room.  I want to, but I’m afraid.  Afraid it’s going to hurt.  I know all the things you would say, but I’m not you.  My emotion is a noisy specter.  I still fear it sometimes.

“An emotion is experienced.  Nothing more nothing less.  It passes like smoke in the wind,” you say.

Yadda, yadda, yadda.  I know this, yet there’s this ghost with it’s tongue in my ear whispering, “Oh yes.  It’s going to hurt.  And you’re going to hate it.”

I already hate it.

“We live in duality,” you say; “if you invite happiness you also invite misery.”

Well, together also invited apart.  The whole brought along only half.  I wrestle with my being in this miasma of philosophic existential muck.  My being wants to sit happily on a waterlily contemplating The Big Nothingness, but there’s this beast in the corner, you see.  It keeps staring at me.

Sometimes it laughs and says, “Stupid woman.  You can’t see the poetry of a flower by plucking off its petals to examine them more closely.”  Sometimes I find the strength to agree.

So I sit here in the screaming silence at the edge of the hole you left with this stupid specter.  Your absence is still scowling at me from the corner.  I’m just plucking petals and wishing you’d come home.