unrequited

You’re content. Your life is as full of yarn as you can handle, and then some. You spend your days and your nights with furpiles that knead you and wake you and bat at your hair and hork and sit on your yarn. But also blink at you and purr and drool.

Your days are filled with dvds, and your nights are by and large restful. You’re getting better, slowly, surely, finally, and you’re at the place, at long last, where you can say you’re not feeling too bad. You vaguely wish you could find a “real job”, and you wish the job interviews you had went better, but by and large you’re okay. You’re doing well with the yarn dyeing business, and that amazes you. You cover your expenses, you have yarn in the stash, and your gramma comes by every Saturday.

You’re able to live your true dreams, slowly but surely. Soon, you know, you’ll be able to share them with others.

And then one night, the dream comes.

A mix of hyperealism and longing, where probably in real life there was a Picasso in your arms, but in your mind and your soul and your dream, there was the baba in the flesh again. Her softness, her feel, her smell, and always, her tongue.

The chasm is there.

It always was.

I’d just forgotten, for a little while.

I finally deleted the emails from a year ago today, emailing me support and love and memories and condolences. I just…. It was time to acknowledge the truth. I’ll never be ready. I’ll never be less lonely, less sad. I can never reply to them without tears. So I am sharing this here with you now, in a concentrated way, perhaps you’d say, and letting you know that your words, they have all touched me, and they meant a lot to me. They were a comfort, and they let me know I wasn’t alone in loss.

I wasn’t alone in being shattered by my little girl leaving.

But I am lonely. It’s a special kind of lonely. The kind where you wouldn’t change anything and everything happened just as it should have, and yet.

And yet.

It’s a year later, and it’s a year without. The best baba I have ever known, and life went on without her. Surely that should have been impossible.

There are days I forget entirely, and moments I feel sad about that. The forgetting.

How could I forget? How dare I?

All love is unrequited, some claim.

For 14 years, Daphne Rachel Marie and I had each other, me with my hugs and my voice, her with her licks and her pokes. She followed me everywhere and slept in my arms every night. When we were apart, I missed her and she missed me. She greeted me at the door every time I came home.

I was hers and she was mine.

I am still hers.

And she…. she is not mine. Never again in life.