January 29th, 2010
I thumb through pictures of my kinfolk.
And it’s only reasonable to think, to woe over the fact that they are no more mine than I am theirs.
Some sort of nostalgic, sentimental crappishness overwhelms me when I think of it. How much easier it is to write them all off, setting them aside for dust to collect on them over the years. Yet they’re not static. They are moving, growing, changing beings. And as long as I am separated from them, I am missing out on the growth. I am missing out on the change. I am setting myself up to speak with strangers if a reunion must force us to meet again. My forlorn is growing more forlorn, if there is such a possibility.
She looks like me, only darker.
My step-mother has said it’s difficult for my father to think about me because I remind him so much of his mother.
That is painful for me on so many levels. I still miss my grandmother. She was my own until I was thirteen. Mine. A piece of me. A part of who I am. As I grow older, though her body is now gone, she remains a growing, expanding piece of me. And it is that part of me that is her that aches in the loss of my family. She would be broken hearted to see the pieces as they’ve fallen now.
It’s so sad. I suppose even now the ache within me glows brighter. Because the relationships I do have with my kinfolk are a facade. I’m afraid to call them. Because I am who I am and I have hurt them. Or maybe only one of them. But we’re not close enough to conquer those hurts. So instead, we fester over the years, thinking about how much he hates me, or how much I am hated. When the reality of the extent of true emotion will never be known. All we have is time, right?
Yet time doesn’t always heal wounds. In fact, sometimes the passage of time does much more than wound us, sometimes it festers and pustules and stinks so thickly that you cannot breathe when you finally see that person again. Sometimes time is the slow burn that keeps the coals simmering but won’t allow the flames to flourish until you open the door of emotion, and in an entrance into each others lives again which will give the oxygen the flame needs to devour us all whole.
I may have been wrong. But I’m human. I can’t ask you to forgive me for anything more than that.
A write off would be so much easier. It’s like I’m hanging onto an outcast lover, with hopes that one day the timing might be right. In the end, that grip upon someone– clinging to the thought of always having them within reach, doesn’t help the gashes to heal. I know this. But I can’t just disregard them. I can’t just write them off. I have tried, goddamn it, I have tried. Their flesh draws me to them, we are of the same man.
So with this guilt, with this pain, with this battle between opposing intentions, I inwardly weep. I weep for my loss, and for the agony this slowly causes me, as time eats away at the relationships we never had. I weep for the ideals I had in my head– the closeness I had only imagined, the friendship and bond we would have simply because we were blood. I know better than that. Rationally, I do.
Blood is nothing. Blood means nothing.
This sequence of words makes me numb.