A few weeks ago, over late breakfast and endless coffee with a dear friend, an innocent conversation about mind and heart, well and ill, acceptable and eccentric led me down a path I have avoided for decades. Memory floodgates opened with talk of mental illness, archaic treatments, and the line, if there is one, between creativity and crazy.
Images of long love lost came forefront to eyes closed with unwept tears. The man I knew so many years ago, the man who was “the one”, who would have been my children’s father; his pictures burned away and name unspoken is with me. I rest my head in my hands and am emotion choked, trying to understand the depth of feeling that washes over me. My friend gives me wise, needed silence as I voice the unsounded. I tell the merest outline of the soul buried story.
Had we been older, wiser, married, I would have had a voice then in the treatment path taken. But family trumps friend, sister trumps lover, so I am left out. And when the thing is done, the things are done to him, my actor, artist, poet, lover is gone, his photographs taken and imagined are gone.
Physical recovery is long. The aftermath is harder still: to see the man, the face, hear the voice, hold the hands, touch the body, but never be able to again touch his mind. There is no more him there, only emptiness, meaningless, feelingless calm. The days, nights, months, years we had together are glimpsed darkly, far away, shared with someone who cannot return. Hurting most, the sparkling water lake days and nights are gone, remembered only by me, and only with aching tears. As months go by, I cannot stay; I have no now place, only the past; I must leave.
My friend quietly drinks his coffee, listens and comments only with his eyes, his hands not reaching for mine, but there just the same, quietly letting me feel what has been unfelt for so long; he gives me time and silence, lets me process and then let go what for years has been inside, unsaid, is now out, what can float away and while never forgotten, can be released. I can exhale.