Tabitha Vohn's Blog - Posts Tagged "healing"

The past few months
have been some of the most
painful of my life
Horror made flesh
thinking I'd lost you
my heart and head in
constant combat
warring over footsteps
traced back overgrown paths
that led us here
I dissected every fallen branch
fleeting white bird
trying with my fingers to feel
the indents of footprints
where I'd misstepped
was it too many texts?
not enough space between
my exhales to give you room
to breathe? did my desperate
attempts to keep you
smother your lungs with shadow?
was my imprint in your heart
merely an inlet
a temporary crevice
to let the light in?
Truth is
none of it matters
I dream a life so impossible
wanting to fold you in it
wanting to reinvent home
a place to call yours and
this connection of ours to
stretch in symphonic chord
eternal
always calling you back to me
I never stopped
to consider
that I made my steps rocks
at your feet
my tears tidal fetters too
vast of an obligation to
wade through
These past months
I've cried enough and
died enough for
both of us
lost in the labyrinth of
this nightmare I feared would
put on human skins
of
losing you, losing you
losing you, losing you...
but love, you are not mine
to lose
and you never were
and love
damn...I miss
calling you that
telling you good morning and
wishing you goodnight
Sometimes the need to
tell you I love you
swells in my throat like
panic constricts my lungs
and so I say it to a piece
of jade to forsaken air my
prayers become pleas
God, let him know how much
he's loved today
my sweet wonderful gift
I tell you that too often
but that
is truth
mirror brother
whose bond I feel
deep as blood
that space you carved
is always yours
and I hope you have room
to breathe now
I hope from now on
to love you truer
to my word
no strings attached
setting aside my covetous
self
allow the chaos
to have its course
I've never doubted
for a single
minute of it
that you're worth it.

"I was younger then and easily fooled
and the ocean was deep and dark and blue
and I took off my shoes to let the water freeze my bones.
I waded until I could no longer walk and it was too cold to swim but
still I kept on walking at the bottom of the sea for I could not tell the
difference between the ocean and the lack of someone I loved and I
had not yet learned how the task of moving on is a muscular task,
a skill you need to learn,
as necessary as survival." (Eriksson, 12)

--from I Go to the Ocean to Say Goodbye

P.S.
If the choice is to move on
or not survive,
I'd rather be food
for the fishes
than to
love you
or miss you
less
than I do
in this moment <3

Really there's just
this one
She lurks in my bones
like poison in the marrow
I can't fully extract
this journey of
spiritual transplant I'm on
makes her
more phantom
than
poltergeist
but she's the
scar of Morgoth blade
wound that keeps on
wounding
resurrects like those
mythic demons who take on
childlike form
she is the small girl with
terror tears who
sits
abandoned
in that
space
you said you needed
Frozen
waiting for you to
come and claim her
She whispers that it's
all my fault
all my fault
all my fault
I'm too much
or not enough to
ever win first place
in this
war for hearts
but now I've circled
back to sawing souls
in two and whether I'm
hacking limbs or
letting go of you
still she whispers
the issue
is not what I do
to show
I love you
Failure
is that I've already
lost you
or found my value's
ringing up expendable
on your price tag
And It's not just you
If it was she'd relinquish
this power over me
instead she
laundry lists the
loved ones who've
chosen someone else
over me
I carry every
forfeit
like it's become my DNA
this catastrophe of complex
I cannot reconcile except to
accept her accusations that the
summation
of these incidents
the
Common Denominator
is
--Me--
so I went to my husband a
month ago
sobbing
asking
why is it always me
who gets chosen over
even if the other person is
clearly
blindingly
wrong!
He'd know
Even he
chose someone else
over me
Maybe that's what makes
this monster
so complicated
that it's not some
distorted vision some
illusion in my head
He paused
and said
"I can't speak for ----
but
with me
it's because I knew
You were the one who
wouldn't leave"
Maybe
if I thought enough
of myself
to believe that this could be
I wouldn't be spinning this
neverending mindfuck of a
web over you
I wish I thought enough
of myself
to believe such things are true
But she pokes inside my bones
reminds me I've come up lacking
Again
and
to see her for what she is
maybe I just need to
Accept it
maybe that's
Just okay
to be the
one person
no one has to worry
about losing
because I love you all
too much
to raise a fuss
Learned to keep it inside
not let her out much
--You--
turned me inside out
and woke her up
and I'm sorry if I've
expected too much
from you
deafened by her whispers
I've been busy banking
on grace
to make me less
of a headcase
and part of that
is acknowledging her
so I can let her go
Love
the way she's supposed to be
and make less of a
Monster
out of me.

I wonder
why it is
that I don't afford others
the same capacity for love
that I possess

why I constantly
doubt who truly
holds me as
irreplaceable as
I do them

How arrogant of me!

Am I the only one who
lives like this?
constantly calculating
heart rhythms
like profit percentages

I
who with my
hypocrite tongue
profess that true love
comes with no strings
attached yet I

can't stop trying
to earn it
can't stop wondering
which flaw will
unravel devotional threads
leave me
open wound
abandonable

I
suffocate in
red tissue suspicions
that my expendability
renders heart temple
homes for me
as wind changeable
as forest fire
or dandelion seeds
I am the reed
who bends to mask
the fact that she is
broken

blinded to what she's
spirit-known for lifetimes
her brothers and sisters
bending with her
all along a breeze-
battered sea

the Irony
is bittersweet
in reality this
not so temporary
insanity
has
nothing to do
with any of them
and everything
to do with
what's wrong
in me.

so why is it
that even when I
gaze through unclouded
lenses
fresh scrubbed
redemption cleansed
identity
I can be loved loudly
by God himself
and still be destroyed
quietly
by my doubt
by inner frailty
by your earthly
silence.

I've been trying to
force myself to be
okay

as if I can
rearrange my
spiritual insides
through sheer will

as if filling my
days with endless
tasks tasked to
prove I deserve to
exist can somehow
make me worthy of
what can only be
construed as gifts

meanwhile

my brave smiles
feel like frauds
I cry from exhaustion
on the drive home
feel unworthy of
thank you's
ask constant forgiveness
when I pray
Most of all I feel
Guilty

How can I be
sheltered
in such a calm
sea of blessings
yet
acknowledge this
broken limb I
keep trying to
kick with

It's like maybe
if I stopped trying
to force myself to
be happy
I could stop
hating the truth
that I'm not yet
healed

If I
stop tugging on stitches
mending
my heart could
beat free of this
antiseptic sting

Maybe if I
can just accept that
I loved someone
enough to upend my
spiritual insides
and I don't want to
reinvent again

Because hope dies
last
and I'm still standing
with scalpel in hand ready
to donate heart, arms, voice,
this pen, sleepless nights,
tear-stained streets, yoga mat
cries and heavenward pleas

Maybe if I can
forgive myself for
mistakes
I fear I must have made

Then I'll make space
for redemption to
enter in

It's true
God heals us when we're
broken
It's equally true
I have to let Him

We are the sum of
absent parts too fractured
for our fathers to pass
on to us

pride & hugs
admissions of love
they harbor like empty
perfume bottles long
bereft of scent I remember
what it meant to live like
a squatter in my own home

welcoming my brother into
the bedroom I'd amp up the
speakers when screams
punctured the walls in stereo

when burning precious gas
dollars down back roads with
no center line or sunsets in
an abandoned cemetery felt
like the only freedoms I was
loathed enough to know
before my absence was missed
in an otherwise confined
existence my presence a
tolerated mandatory sentence

I daily wondered how someone
so disgusted with me
could care whether or not I was
around

Your generation is not the first
to seek an amputee home
though transience has become
a pathogen passed through the
water each year the mortality rate
grows younger & I wonder
what remission might be missing
if the wounds were only allowed
to fester a bit longer

My feet trod through
land mines of a battle
I was drafted in I
contemplated pastor's basements
and then-boyfriend's parents'
spare bedrooms
rather than wait for the misstep
I thought would solidify the sum
of all those fractured parts I knew
the breaking would be inevitable

But I waited.
I stayed.

You know, when the blast came
I was too numb to feel it.
All those flesh wounds hieroglyphed
each what, where, when
But I remember him being
more stunned by my apathy than
I was when the gingerbread house
caved in

By then I felt neither love
nor hate for the man who had
damaged me so much
the blessed coma of indifference
was a victory

And if that was the end of my story
I'd say to you
--run--
run & never look back

Instead I urge you Love
--stay--
go back
Live to fight another day.

In the short term was
cease fire coldness
his first "I love you"
felt as foreign & intimate
as a rape
it's been fifteen years
since that date and I've
risen from those ashes to
say:

There's Healing in
understanding our fathers
and that Mending is
--Necessary--
cause ghosts breed monsters
and we have to see them
for what they are
to keep ourselves from
slipping into that impalpable
grey likeness of hereditary
brokenness

Though their stories are dissimilar
at the core of our fathers is the same
guarded barricaded hunger
wanting to be loved but not knowing
how to give what they haven't received
those instincts long buried with the dead
& with the rejectors & with the ones who
kicked them out of houses, made them
feel their lack of worth was a brand
under their skin they could never wash
out, these men emanate hurt
like steam rising from
asphalt

Nothing can resonate from a heart
iron-walled in, only if it be that
Pavlovian rejection, they do not realize
the imbalance of criticisms they pay us
with no praise or the silence we take as indifference
Pinter moments are all they have to offer us
but we weren't taught to read their eyes like Braille
and they never recognized that the work of their hands
fashions a mirror symmetry of brokenness

Love, I've looked at your dad and seen the
kindness he wishes he could give you
buried beneath that rough veneer I fear
his asking you to stay was the closest to
an admission of love as he could give you

There's a heart breaking for you under all
the inner shit he can't claw through to
be what you so desperately need him to be

Know how I know?
A week before my wedding, my dad
threatened to kick me out for the millionth
time, all because he found a dirty cup in my room
and on the day of my wedding, my brother came home
and found him sobbing. To this day, on the rare occasion
that I get an " I love you" it's delivered with the reticence
of a dog waiting to be kicked. it's been hard for me to
parent love to someone who's been animal wounded
and tried to pass that heirloom on to me

but my hatred, and numbness, and hurt
are healing over. I wish Dad's would but
he's still trodding land mines, shouldering the
burden of hereditary curses on tired shoulders

So is your dad
because deep down our fathers don't believe
they deserve our love
so they covet theirs greedily

But Love,
I tell you all this
because your tender spirit is
at that same precipice
and I'm filling up the emptiness
with true stories & fretting &
tears & prayers because

At this crossroad
We have one of two ends

Make peace with the enemy
Or become them.