My past is an armor I can’t take off no mater how many times you tell me the war is over – Jessica Katoff
The painful embrace
You learn the inexplicable paradox of things
The first time you saw ballet and could not fathom how gentleness
can be severe
The burn of icy winds lashing your face
The first time you made love, and pain was pleasure
You drop in the dark gaps of language, where words are rigid
and letters are fixed, astonished at the vastness of all the grey areas, for
which no words suffice
Helpless, your thrash and flail under suicidal thoughts, and
say “I’m fine.”
Your limitation as a human being becomes at once the dirty
black boot that crushes you, and your only solace
The redundancy of language before the incessancy of human
emotion is a new, mature kind of failure, because no matter how old or wise you
grow, you’ll never be able to find your way through a thick fog
Your smallness in the face of suffering teaches you
humility, but humility does not stop the bleeding
Many times you close your eyes and imagine losing yourself
completely in a warm enveloping embrace, your whole being dissolving in
another, the utter surrendering of your person, the letting go of all past
judgments and future expectations
“Maybe this time it will be different… maybe”
Open your eyes, the fall is long and painful, a perfect
embrace can – though rarely – last for two minutes, but the bruise will last a
decade
You seethe under the theories, and the myriad stories of
overcoming. Only you, your innermost private human, the heart inside your
heart, where your mind does not dare tread, understands how painful an embrace can
be.
Listen to an audio reading of this poem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQhWy-P5DuU&t=9s
