The summit

There is no sanctity, even in the old things anymore. Through this all I've felt numb, hungering to feel again. I pursue it, against odds and obstacles and hardship. I find the echoes in the ghost of suffering, the impression of heartbeats in heartache. Anger, pain, loss, I lift my head to these at the reminder of sensation. Life! So consuming once now so elusive. Erasing all the questions that once consumed me as trivial and driving them to the bottom of my mind.

Today I touched a ghost and I question. Is it worth it to chase these phantoms of feeling, tracing down old scars to remember the hurt that caused them? I wonder if I gave someone my blood, if the numbness like an anesthetic would cool their thoughts as well. It is such a change.

I wonder. What was it like for him? Did he think to himself how much older I look? How my hands are still when they were once always in motion? I wonder if he noticed how still my once all consuming heart has become. I wonder if he felt the stir of what he once felt for me, or if the whole time he was already like this and I just had to play catchup. I wonder what it felt like to him to touch again, briefly embrace one who he once told he loved and drove and touched and called and shared and thought of and fucked. If he felt the echo I listened so carefully for in myself. I hope he did. I wish I'd had more time.

This place was sacred. This island, these trees, this boy and the water. They were dreams of a word before the harshness of adulthood and the coming of such stillness. It was like a church, a mecca to which I sometimes dreamed of returning to and to see him again. Not for love, not for redemption nor revenge but for the same reason one makes a pilgrimage to a shrine. To touch, to be in the presence of that which is reverent and divine. I wanted to remember what that love felt like, even and especially in the echos of the pain it caused, the most vivid reminder. This island, I came to find made of dirt and trees and rock like any and all other places I've been and found nothing but more hunger. The boy still shy and still living the same life. His arms still strong, his hair, skin, the same. A boy, like the boy yesterday or any of the boys before. When I remembered him I didn't remember that he was just a boy, I remembered that I'd loved him more then I loved myself. When staring at a boy, it is hard to remember that he is the one. He is the one who wrote an essay about how I set him free. He held me. He saw me cry. He came forever to see me. He picked me up. And he wounded me for years. Love and notoriety and animosity and significance symbolized by one boy, but it is hard to make the connection anymore.

When he told me it was over I told myself I would not care. I promised myself I would be better, that when he saw me again I would have fixed whatever he didn't want about me and he would love me again and I would not care. I didn't want to care. That's all I wanted, the absence of indignity. I imagined it in my head, some nights. And then when the day comes to pass so many years later it passes again like any other, my wish to not care inverting into so desperately wishing I felt something. But his skin felt like skin and his voice sounded like a voice and I did not recall the powerful blows he once held above me. I could not connect these things.

Maybe I will see him again. Maybe with more time it would be different. I think it might. But rather then wrought with years of weight and significance the time, the epic meeting of former lovers once so charged he worried I'd take revenge for breaking me so hard, passed as the rest of my life does and has and shall. Quiet, still for the most part. An exercise in existence.

It was nice to see him again. On some level I'd missed him. The ferry is loading now and the dream, the sanctity, the place of mystery and myth in my head of the boy who held my heart in his hands is over. I was afraid I was not free, but I am. I am free, no one holds power over me and I make my own choices.  The thought makes me sad, I had hoped to still have strings touching my heart, even if long left idle.

On verra. I hope I see him again. I want him to remind me how I felt, even if just to hurt a little. I am liberated and lost, and this trip has destroyed one of the few places and memories I'd kept sacred all these years.