Sometimes images express sentiment

 better than a multitude of words.

 Colo

Blog Notes: I used to tap into the energy of the stream to write my heart. Lately I have found it difficult and complicated to put my heart in my posts. It's nice to entertain or enlighten, but I am really on the stream to share my heart. I have nearly polished the Gypsy story out of existance and I want to finish it.

So not being a great teacher or someone that has evolved enough in society to really tell other people how to feel or how to live.....I am attempting to return to my roots...smaltzy poetry and the people that I love...my intuition..my story...my heart...my words.

 

The following is a repost of one of the first stories (with some changes) that I wrote on the stream. I will go where it takes me like my old friend Diesel suggested to me almost 2 years ago I will "Read what I want ....Write what I want...and try to reveal my heart here..."

 

All the witnesses have died or moved away....and I have changed my heart a hundred times since I lived this.. ..

DANIEL

When I say his name I still remember the energy and the intellect. I can still bring his face to me. Old passions die hard. He was kinetic. He was a blonde, with blue eyes, and older (weren't they all back then). He was smart and intense. He was a tall rangy Yankee. When I met him I had never heard the expression "Bust my chops" before. I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. I was in my early 20's and it was an exciting time. I had a job that gave me enough latitude to work with other alcoholics. My avocation and my heart belonged to them. I was studying metaphysics with some friends and mentors. I had been saved from certain death (alcoholism) and I believed all things were possible.

I really hated this guy on sight. I had always liked guys with a little meat on their bones and he was almost skinny. I was drawn to construction workers and men who were physical. Dan was a manager for the local phone company. His career was on the upswing. He had been transferred from up North to run a new division. He seemed too smart to me. He seemed a little haunted and a lot driven. He was a Sagitarian. I was a Leo. And after all he was a "Yankee" and I was a Texan. Our worlds did not blend until they crashed together.

I really liked men (back then) I thought I could control. Hindsight is 20-20. I didn't want to have to think in relationships. I changed men about as often as I changed my moods. I believed it was because being in charge was important to me. Still compulsive about sex I was really a user of men. The last refuge of the committment phobic is the ability not to care.

To make a long story short he told his story in a group of drunks. Bending over to lean on the podium in a faded room   he shared his life. I couldn't remember a word he said later, I just knew I had seen him for the first time.  I found his eyes for the first time. We were the only two people in that room and I was never the same.

After the meeting he sought me out. We talked for two hours while he braced himself against a door frame. It looked innocent enough. He told me about his wife, that he had married young. She was unhappy and wanted to move back to home. He described his grandmother, who raised him. She had practically achieved sainthood and was still alive. He talked about his daughter and his great love for her. He talked about being a Union official, and how they were trying to silence him with a promotion. He talked about being a drunk, that had a way out.

Later he would tell me I reminded him of his grandmother and I took it as a compliment. Like all married men looking for another woman, he was unhappily married. Like all married men he had a lot of regrets. Like most married men he used his daughter as an excuse for for staying where he was.

At first we just made reasons to see each other. We talked and laughed and hung out. There was no sex. I thought there were lines I would not cross. Eventually, my justifications were carefully in place, I was a single woman. Any morality fences would be broken on his end, not mine.

I talked to my sponsor, she warned me against this impulse driven relationship. "I know you'll do what you want, anyway." I figured it was because she was a Catholic. I talked to my spiritual mentor she claimed Sagitarian men were often unfaithful, and we needed to wait till we caught up with each other in the next life. I went to a tarot reader. "He's not for you." I was warned three times, so I couldn't ever say I didn't know.

I wasn't an upstream swimmer, and the undertow was tugging at me. I cut off my relationships with other men. I deep cleaned my apartment. There were more excuses to see each other. He was teaching me about the phone business. I got a new job just blocks from where he worked. We met every day in the park for lunch. We professed love for each other long before we slept together. When we slept together the world shifted and it didn't shift back until he was gone. On Thanksgiving, we stared at each other over someone else's turkey. I didn't think then about his wife or his daughter.

I left the old men and the poker game to go out with him after meetings. Some of them raised their eyebrows. My old men would make comments. It was just like in the movies. I had come to believe that we had other lifetimes together. I had come to hope (like most women in affairs with married men) that he would leave his wife. I never asked him to, but I hoped.

The affair lasted two years. My soul suffered two lifetimes. We were a weekend plus lunch couple. I had him for some part of every holiday, but I couldn't take him home to my parents. Sometimes he stayed the night. He told his wife he was volunteering with alcoholics. We 12 stepped artist Tim together. I had a used rubber in my pocket the whole time. He fixed up my car. He started working out and bought a motorcycle. He talked about how he couldn't stand to be around his wife. She cussed him out in her native tongue and was paralyzed with depression. He bought her things. A car, a diamond bracelet, a new house. He got me a motorcycle helmet and a cowboy hat. I was happy with my trinkets. She really wanted him.

Looking back there were three things that ended the relationship. First I learned that his wife laid out his clothes for him every morning. Second, he set a date to leave his family for me. He was going to tell her he was leaving when she returned from home from visiting her Mama. And third I met her.......

It was a Sunday morning. She had been home to visit her family and had asked him to show her his group after he picked her up at the airport. Just hours before he had left my bed. She was tall and exotic looking. She had a beautiful accent and warm brown eyes. She had long flowing hair and a shy smile. She wasn't what I had imagined. She grabbed my arm like I was a long lost friend. I wasn't sure if she knew it was me, but she knew it was someone. "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer" ran through my head.

We talked for a while. Dan tried to join in. He was fidgety and jumpy. She smiled sadly.."I think I will go home soon for good. We all have to go somewhere when our lives change. My daughter should be back East." I felt no animosity from her. Maybe she didn't really know or maybe she was giving it one last shot in the dark. She seemed tired not desperate.I knew as we talked in the old kitchen at my group, that I owed her an amends. It was over for her, but I was through too. She never mentioned her marriage or that her life was falling apart. She talked about her daughter and being Puerto Rican in Texas. She was gracious and shy and gentle.

Sometimes when you feel guilty you are. Dan called me from his house. They had been talking and were going to work out the details of a separation. He hadn't mentioned any other woman. My heart lurched. "Wait" I begged him. "If you want out OK. Don't leave her for me." He was dumbstruck. I got mean. "How could I ever trust you when I see what you've done to her." Suddenly I was her advocate. "You stay with Bianca, it's where you belong. I'm not the type of woman to lay your clothes out in the morning."

What we did to her.... We saw each other a few more times, but it was over when she grabbed my arm. I knew as we talked in the old kitchen at my home group, that I owed her an amends. I had tried to pay my debt by sending him home for good. I hoped that somehow the two of us had been working on our karma. I hope we didn't create a new karmic debt to be faced in the future. He stopped by one day to let me know that he had requested a transfer to another state. He couldn't be in the same town with me it hurt too much. I gave him the motorcycle helmet and told him to give it to his wife.

The odds are that Dan went on to other women, but I never had another married man. He came back into town after a few weeks. He brought me roses and wanted to talk about us. I wouldn't go back to his hotel with him and I wouldn't take him home with me.

There are no morals here, just like there were no morals back then. I regret that I hurt someone, but I don't regret loving him. On November nights when the weather has not quiet changed, I remember his smile and his long hands. I remember being pulled through a tunnel into his life. I can forgive us. We are riding together on the motorcycle and there is no turning back.

 

cry
verb

to produce tears as the result of a strong emotion, such as unhappiness or pain
I heard someone crying in the next room.

If you cry over spilled milk, you express regret about something that has already happened or cannot be changed:
There's no point in crying over spilled milk.

cry
noun
"Go on, have a good cry," he said.

 

 

 

I don’t cry often. I probably don’t cry enough. But tonight I cried. I remembered the day Elvis died I was driving across Texas (drunk of course) and I stopped to cry when I heard it on the radio.

 

I was reminded of my friend Ray. Ray killed himself shortly after I started blogging. One more sad ending to the people that I have loved. I’m not sure if it’s because he kind of looked like Elvis or because I couldn’t save him. Maybe I was crying for all the people that lose their way…my kindred spirits.

 

I’m not sure if crying is really good for you. They have lots of studies that have mixed results. It doesn’t matter to me. Sometimes one must feel the pain to know there is joy and cry to feel alive….And I think I may cry a little while longer tonight.....

 

 

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.  ~Kahlil Gibran


Let your tears come.  Let them water your soul.  ~Eileen Mayhew


Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion.  I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.  ~Kurt Vonnegut


Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.  ~Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1860


The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears.  ~John Vance Cheney


Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.  ~Christian Nevell Bovee


Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.  ~Natalie Clifford Barney


Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.  ~Antoine Rivarol


A woman wears her tears like jewelry.  ~Author Unknown


To weep is to make less the depth of grief.  ~William Shakespeare, King Henry the Sixth


It is some relief to weep; grief is satisfied and carried off by tears.  ~Ovid


Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.  ~Golda Meir


Tears are the safety valve of the heart when too much pressure is laid on it.  ~Albert Smith


Invisible tears are the hardest to wipe away.  Just let it out, my friend.  ~Adabella Radici



Women are never landlocked:  they're always mere minutes away from the briny deep of tears.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


Tears are Summer showers to the soul.  ~Alfred Austin, Savonarola


Lips that taste of tears, they say,
Are the best for kissing.
~Dorothy Parker


Tears are the silent language of grief.  ~Voltaire, A Philosophical Dictionary


Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion.  ~Steel Magnolias


What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.  ~Jewish Proverb


I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry.  I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week.  I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.  ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar


The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.  ~Isak Dinesen


I like the snot to run a little, the tears to accumulate a bit before reaching for the handkerchief.  Then I know I'm really crying.  Crying just isn't crying unless it's messy.  ~D.H. Mondfleur



More grievous than tears is the sight of them.  ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin



It is such a secret place, the land of tears.  ~Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

 

 

I like to think there is something spiritual about the release of tears...but when I cry I'm too sad to feel spiritual. ~Anonymous

 

They will leave you with no warning.

Like you always knew they would.

I will meet them in the morning.

And I will end this dance for good.

 

The Valley of Pain will never claim me.

 My stormy spirit will leave at last.

If you watch me as I go,

Let my memory be gentle on your soul.

I want to ride the wind and lightening dark and free.

 

 

I will gather with the dancers,

As we pivot and become

 Shadows against the brightest sun.

 

I will join the wordless singers,

As we begin our ancient run.

 

The bracelets sweat,

on my darkened skin.

My movements slowed by age and sin….

 

I turn my face towards the merciful sound.

Where hope rises up,

as the ashes settle on the ground.