I believe that sadness is like a glue that connects us, it’s why we so easily recognize others who carry the same weight.
Sadness opens a portal between people, clicks in place like a duct hose, because sadness seeks out souls suffering in similar ways. It brings us into sharp focus to each other among a crowd. It is a quiet spotlight that singles us out.
Our portals just fit each other, like getting the USB cord right the first time. I knew it from the second we met.
In the quiet probing of each other on our first date, and the silent screaming at each other over the next 900 days. The sadness flowed back and forth between us, and we recognized it, and we understood. And now four hands carried the weight, and four feet guided us.
But, who wants just a constantly open portal, having to be a vessel for sadness all the time? Most people (us included) would slam it shut if possible, with life’s distractions, vices, excuses.
Over time and connection, and flowing in and out of each other, the sadness escapes little by little, through our seams, and vaporizing safely through our pressurelocks.
But people whose suffering doesn’t recognize each other, if the portals don’t fit or the plug is backward, you risk exploding with leaks that big! Have you ever tried to be with someone that didn’t understand your kind of sadness? It doesn’t work. That’s why couples who don’t understand each other explode so big!
If we just let the sadness flow steady, we’d become accustomed to it and carry it with grace. Slow and steady. Through our conversations, and our compassion. Our patience, our kisses, sex, and laughter. So much laughter.
It doesn’t weigh anything to become accustomed to, no! It is far lighter than being trapped underneath it, and far better than exploding!
If we knew how to stay still, stay open and steady, and connected, let the sadness flow, we would all be so much better at giving and receiving love.
I promise… Only the IDEA of sadness is horrifying. The real thing isn’t so bad, especially with four hands and four feet.
Because, whether your portal is flowing, shut down, or leaking too fast… sadness can’t just stay inside us forever.
Yet… Real sadness never fully goes away either, however you choose to let it out… Us humans don’t just let go that easily.
You can never “let go” of love anyway. I think if we’re lucky, if we slow down and listen, we just let go of the expectations and hopes we had for a particular kind or source of love.
Sometimes that love needs to settle into a permanent place inside us, where we can admire and appreciate it, let it beam from our chests… we can look at it and enjoy it any time we want! We can carry its message through our days…
We just can’t take it out of the glass to play anymore. And that’s OK.
Maybe the rest of the pain that’s left at the end, finally blows out of our eyes and ears and nose and mouth, the minute we cross over. Maybe in one massive fart!
And then our portals that used to carry sadness, emptied out, rinsed gently, will seek each other out, seal together again, and fill with immense joy, until infinity!
I know I will see you again someday. Someday knowing that will be enough.
Until then, I don’t know what I will do.
Don’t be long (1/21/15)
I have never belonged to anyone, not from the very start
I thought i belonged to my mother
Until I found out she only wanted my father and
He was already a million miles away
I might have belonged to a stranger
But he didn’t get very far
by the time the police came
I might have belonged to my grandfather
But eventually people die, so after awhile I couldn’t stay
I might have belonged to a group of us girls, but they changed their minds in the 7th grade,
so
I just kept walking and pulling from that violent mob,
until they let me go
I thought I belonged to someone who loved me, but every time I was quite wrong
Because you see,
I have never belonged to anyone.
Not you,
Not them,
Not me.
7-1-18
You’ll be judged forever, for not knowing how to smile through your thoughts
For being just slightly weary
For being just slightly wary
For being exhausted.
You’ll be judged for being the sad girl, angry, or a little too tough
You’ll be judged for what others have done to you
when you can’t muster the ease or enthusiasm, but
No one will know how hard you fight
How hard you try
I don’t know, I mean she’s just so serious all the time…
You’ll sit behind barricades you didn’t build
Avoiding touch, invasion
For being just slightly unsure.
And then when you’re unsure, you’ll be judged
I mean she should have more confidence, she’s so pretty!
As if you hadn’t thought of that before.
You’ll be judged for having buried your softness so far beneath the surface
No one could ever destroy it again.
Yet your softness is the only thing that will save you,
You’ll spend years digging it out of the wreckage
Just to be judged, because
I just can’t explain it, she’s just too far gone…
The Only Drake I Fux With
Pale Blue
“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions.
The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.
Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years.
That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”
― Ann Druyan