Dear Pilot

Six weeks have passed since your last contact. I have long given up ringing your number, leaving you voice message or text-ing you, in hopes of a response. It's as though you have died, though I know you have not. Hiding ... you play this game of hiding. In my grief for you, I have come to see you, not as that supernal creature into which I made you, not as that figure I exhalted, but as a mere human ~ a man. Flawed, wounded, and perhaps incapable of knowing truly what love is. How can this be? I have asked myself so many times. It just is.

Each time you pop back into my life, it's when I've just begun to face life without you ... when I've just begun to cast you away from my heart. And I love you so much, so intensely, so deeply, that when I tear you away from my bruised heart, I also tear it's friable cloak-skin. How many wounds can one person have ~ from the mere act of loving another? Loving another amounts to war against oneself. And searing, painful lessons learned. I am learning more how to be me ... just me, and not defined by my relationship to someone else.

I know you will re-appear in my life. And I don't know what I shall do when this happens.

You

a poem by Carol Ann Duffy

Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head,
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.

Falling in love
is glamorous hell; the crouched, parched heart
like a tiger ready to kill; a flame's fierce licks under the skin.
Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in.
I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine,
in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze,
staring back from anyone's face, from the shape of a cloud,
from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at me

and I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are
on the bed, like a gift, like a touchable dream.