Category: Emotions

Friendship Garden

I am lucky to have cultivated a lush garden of beautiful, meaningful friendships throughout my life.  I am luckier, still, to be planted in the deep soil of my friends’ gardens where they shower me in love, and light, and their amazing company.  To exist in a well tended garden cultivates a gratitude so profound it can only erupt from me in joyful colors painted with hugs, laughter, and happy tears like sacred rain upon parched earth.

- gws

Significant Other

My significant other 
Is more other than significant now
I wish I felt better about this fact
I do not miss the now of him
I’m still in love with the then of him
When love knocks you can never know 
The beauty or horror in its entourage 
You believe love can conquer all
And learn that love is often not enough 
My significant other left
A significant mark on me
That is hardly insignificant 

-gws

The Next Chapter

And so comes the end of the heaviest chapter
The plot twisted dramatically 
In the hands of an unreliable narrator 
Linear time fractured
Slowed
Ran backward 
Perspectives shifted
Creating more confusion than clarity

Muted colors of nostalgia dull recollections 
Emotional sharpness blunted
The hollow ache of a long goodbye 
Completed with the deliberate placement 
Of an arch-ending period.

The next act begins with a page turn
“THE NEXT CHAPTER” written atop it

-gws

Christmas Without You

Photo by Jameel Hassan on Pexels.com
I realize that this year’s Christmas 
Will be my first in decades without you
That shatters me like a dropped ornament 
I wanted us to be a Hallmark holiday romantic comedy
But we were, instead, a Nancy McKeon movie of the week
This year is heavy with disappointment 
Like that of not finding that hoped for gift beneath the tree
Or the disillusionment of learning Santa
Is just your parents’ amateur slight of hand
Or that moment in Love Actually when Emma Thompson 
Opens her gift to discover it's a Joni Mitchell CD 
Instead of the expensive necklace that Alan Rickman
Bought for his sexy secretary instead of his loving wife
You keep trying to gift me expired I love yous
I let them fall to the ground like dry pine needles
Christmas lights wear glimmering halos
From the tears that well when the Carpenters croon
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
I will not hang your stocking
Or buy you a well-considered gift
I will, however, cast a Christmas wish
For you to dream of better days
As you nestle in an unfamiliar bed
That old St. Nick blesses you
With a better life ahead

-gws

“I love you”

Photo by Raphael Brasileiro on Pexels.com
You have said a lifetime's worth of, "I love you" in the last ten months
I remember that you rarely said it in the twenty-three years
When I needed to hear it like my blood needed oxygen
What am I to do with your, "I love you" now
Now that I cannot love you anymore
Oh! My heart still loves you
Still wrings drops of hope from itself
Hope hanging heavy from tear tracts
To be wiped bitterly away
Because there is no hope left
Hope is just a tether
Preventing me from moving on
From acknowledging the truth that 
The third body is dead and has been for a long time
Love's hope nearly destroyed me
Consumed me
My heart will not let me pry this foolish hope from her hands
So instead, I have to lock it away
In the dark, cold, empty cavity that is my chest
Heart unable to comprehend that I do this for our own good
It screams and howls in the echoing silence
"One last chance!"  
"One more time!"
"Maybe this time!  Maybe!  Just maybe!"
"I love you" manifests no magic here
"I love you" will not call forth a miracle for us
I still love you,
Too
But I HAVE to love me, 
MORE

-gws