Jenga

I had been feeling it for some time, the build up is always the worst pain. Not the realization that it is happening or the pain that takes place when it does. It is definitely and most certainly the build up. You are literally watching the one relationship, the one person crumble right before your eyes. Or you watch it get hotter and hotter like boiling water until all the bubbles and heat rise over the edges of the pot, and even though you can turn the heat down quickly and remove the pot from the eye of the stove you cant help but to notice the water you lost. The crumbling is like watching someone play Jenga. All the wooden skinny rectangles are built up strategically and carefully, you are never really sure how the pieces will fit or hold up with the other pieces used to build, but you keep stacking them up. You keep understanding, you apologize when you are wrong, you open your mind and heart to receive a perspective that you didn’t have, you wait patiently for the other person to come around in areas that you may have already been developed in. You keep building. Memories of drunken nights hearing that smooth unsteady bass in your voice, Listening to you bare your soul and all the things you cant share sober. I kept building. In some places you watch things topple over and there is disappointment but the will and the desire to keep building goes on. And then, finally there is the one piece taken away that makes the whole build fall right over. People don’t pay attention to the pieces left scattered everywhere after the fall. Or the loud clanging of the wooden pieces when they hit the cold glass top of the table. The loud noises and the scattering release reactions of trauma. Fear, doubt, negative self talk all start happening so rapidly its like everything was triggered all at one time. It’s a fight. A fight for your life, for your love, the fight cant be for that person anymore but it has to be a fight for the love I have developed for myself. Yeah, the build up of this was way worse than the acceptance that life goes on. I was watching it happening but silently praying it wouldn’t happen. Praying that there would be some miracle that kept the building going or even possibly a break in building so the pieces could find their sturdiness, and get acquainted with the design and careful articulation of the words and feelings previously shared. That possibly while letting things settle there would be a hard pause on the strategy of manipulating pieces. But, as I felt the hot, bitter, sad tears come down my cheeks this morning I realized it wasn’t just happening anymore, it had happened. The wedding I pictured in my imagination, and yes ! A whole wedding had happened because I never knew a love like this before. Walking into rooms with you, our power out weighing JayZ and Bey, because baby I believed in you and me. The gatherings of our children, and the meeting of your mom. The sweet, slow, soulful submission, not from me but from you to my femininity and love. The visions I had of me and you came from something I am ever questioning now. I feel sticky like syrup that leaked from the top but I was too lazy to wipe it down with a Clorox wipe, so every time I go to get syrup I feel that sticky residue left over from the last batch of pancakes. I feel dizzy and slightly bamboozled, by this thing called love, R. I could’ve not have wanted more from you, and that piece wouldn’t have fell. I could’ve just been easy like the Dani & Chris Brown remix and those pieces wouldn’t have fell. But instead of you appreciating my imagination, turned visions of you and me. Instead of you feeling ever elated for being chosen by me, by my love you rejected it. You could have admitted you were wrong when you handled me with less than what I expected from you, and those pieces wouldn’t have fell over. The loud clanging on the glass table could have been prevented by a simple apology. Those 16 minutes that you waited to address me, hurt me in a place I had reserved just for you mi amor. Yes! This was a big deal! Yes ! it was my heart in your hands. All I kept hearing was Adele singing, take it easy on me… And now, even as I watched the build up, I am still in shock, like did any of this ever happen ? Now I am questioning if you ever loved me, why wasn’t I enough for you, why would you encourage me so fiercely and whole heartedly to heal, to go on, to be fearless when the one fear I have had my entire life, just scared the love for you right out of me. Don’t you see, of all the desires and all the pain I only feared not being good enough to or for one more person. I feared facing detachment because the attachments for me, at this point were careful. The pieces were strategic. My greatest fear was loving someone, anyone and it not coming back to me in a way I could feel, see or relate to. I trusted you with my hope and maybe you never knew that. For all of my words you have never read, and all of the tunes you never played, you missed out. And if we are being brutally honest, that hurt too. Something so important and invaluable to me, something that is priceless and yet so powerful and truly the moving of my spirit to me, didn’t excite you or ignite something in you. Was that another piece that fell ? There are so many layers to this because even as you have taken away another piece from the build, you took a piece of my heart I at some point willingly gave to you, and in your taking you have still given me more than anyone else. In your accidental taking, because lets be honest, R would never want to be guilty of anything other than selflessness, you still left me with more growth, more life, more love. Only for myself. Now I have to grow through detachment, and I have to grow through positive self talk when I just want to get in my bed, let the darkness comfort me and set fire to the soul ties I now have to you, when I really want to go get a few bottles and packs of cigarettes and play countless songs that remind me of any and every feeling I ever was blessed with, with you, I have to push through that. I have to remove myself from the childhood places that remind me I was never worthy, I was never wanted and no one ever really chose me. I cant lay down, take this ass whooping and scream victim anymore. Because I have come entirely too far to revert back to this way of dealing with disappointment. And I know this because of how and when God placed you in my life. The greatest impact R. The biggest influence. It has been so long since I hoped, since I believed, since I cared this much. Damnit. And now I will and am writing this so I will remember R existed, so I will remember, at one point in my life, I was a priority, and received what I desired to have. But then, the skinny wooden pieces in the game of Jenga fell over. Thankfully, this time, which is crazier because this is the only time it was really what God intended for it to look like, even though we lost it, I didn’t lose me. So when you said thank you and you were grateful and I said fuck you, and you never loved me, I still mean that, but I owe you an apology. Thank you Sir, for allowing me to be in the universal rotation of your existence. Thank you for being yourself. I know I didn’t do half of the things right, I know my healing caused you pain, I know I was ugly, and unstable, and unbearable at times. Thank you for treating me like I mattered when you could. I know I wasn’t enough for commitment, Oops, there is the past way of talking showing up again. So lets leave this on a positive, because even though you hurt me, and didn’t apologize, even though you will never know that this flows from my mind and heart, even though, all the other things R, thank you for playing Jenga with me.