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The Past #5
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In the Past I am keeping this to preserve the critique, because it helped me in the long run and it will continue to help me. Thank you, Cae.
I'm done with moping.
like the poem. it's good you stopped moping, a sign of moving on. but there's nothing wrong w/moping.
here's one of my favorite sayings to use:
a man who cries, is a man with a heart. a man who doesn't cry, is a man without a heart.
If you don't mind a long comment from an old man with whom you have never communicated, and who found your poems quite by random browsing . . . I was in a similar situation, three decades ago this past January. The circumstantial details were probably somewhat different, but the effect of the pain, and the sense of helplessness, listlessness, and hopelessness is eerily the same; and, I suspect, it is the same for all of us. In the midst of such a storm, the illusion of having no way out, no way up, and no possible resolution presents itself; but I assure you, time will prove that illusion to be nothing more than a sham. And drastic action is the worst possible response to the situation you have described. I can offer no quick remedy; the situation must be ridden out until the storm passes of its own. The great thing is that it does pass. You will reach a point of numbness that is both soothing and frightening similtaneously; that is the halfway point, and the bottming out, from which you will be able to rise up. The numbness is odd: the hurt is still there, but the sting is out of it. At that halfway point, you have reached a turn, and when you make the turn, the mist will begin, ever so slowly, to evaporate. Chance encounters, glimpses, memories that come back in your dreams will seem like setbacks; they are not. And, when the next experience of love comes, it will be both triumphantly different, and yet triumphantly able to bring back the previous joys but prevent the previous sadnesses. I do not know if any of this makes sense to you; it hardly makes sense to me; but it is an actual experience described honestly. I can still recall that experience as if it were yesterday. And of the three failed relationships in my life (one of which was my first marriage), the first one---the one I have written about here---stung the most. And yet, in the fourth relationship, the second marriage, and, I believe, the last and finest of them all, I have found delights, joys, and pleasures that have compensated me a thousand-fold for what I experienced thirty years ago. It will come for you as it came for me, because I am not better than you, nor different, just older.
Starward