Ecstatic Longing

I tumble toward summer and feel sadness roll under my body and stretch out before me. From May to October, I get two days every two weeks. Two days to breathe him in, two days to listen, to watch, to feel him around me. Two days to appreciate him before he goes again. 

It is the fourth summer we have lived this. I have come to resonate with the rapture of longing. I adore this sadness that fills me when he goes into an unknown world. He goes to wait for, watch, and manage fire, and comes back smokey serious, exhausted, and ready to release. We live these weekends spring-loaded, filling up, soaking in, and cherishing everything that we can while we can.

These summers have informed my life, and provided me the room to cherish and protect the details of my days. I saturate and bleed over into moments of sparkling possibility. I have incited a still receptivity that keeps me appreciating, appreciating, appreciating. Even the events that jar me, that shut me down and keep me quiet reverberate within my small frame and send me eventually, inevitably, into spasms of creative production that bring me to the edge of exhaustion.

I vascilate between a soaking in of possibility and an outpour of wonder. At day's end, exhausted and reveling in what I have taken in and what I have spewed, my life is the art I have longed to live. 

I have come to this by opening up to the ecstacy of longing. So much of this I had pushed away, hating what I could not have the moment I wanted it, despising the drips of anguish that tugged at my digits, dragging my knuckles to the ground until all I could emit was a grunt of recongnition and a sideways glance of rage. Infuriated to not have what I thought I wanted, I never took a moment to consider the space in between longing and satiation. My anger blinded me to the beauty in the bliss.

It is May. I have just said good-bye for the first time, slipped a love note into his shoe which I hope he finds before his sweat bleaches out my words. The summer stretches out before me and I count down what I can do in between, and ruminate on what I will do in the during.

I have never felt more human about another human, that is to say weak, hopeful, inspired, hobbled, and loved. I have never allowed this particular type of humanity, so it is foreign to me, strange, like a coat that fits tight in the shoulders and loose around the waist. 

I wait in this longing and love everything about not having.

---

I might be out on a bit of an emotional limb here, but I get a little bit anxious at the beginning of the summer, so much unknown and whatnot. Anyway, let me know what you think, if you have the time and the inclination. I am still off FB, so head over to aloverebellion.com and check out the action over there. It's pretty cool.