Wanting is A Purgatory
The day was exactly what a day is supposed to be, lovely and inviting and well paced and with a luxurious amount of space between moments and just enough intention that it rolls itself easily into memory.
We sat under an oak tree and watched the clouds and you said something without even knowing it - the it being the truth of your words - and I felt myself soften into pain so quickly the blades of grass beneath my back became silver as the weight of my own perception was a force upon the thinness of your ignorance. I bled all the way through time, leaving pieces of myself in an unwilling sacrifice to the earth; knowing I will pick at this wound until it becomes a blemish, feeling permanent in the way all things do in teenage hood.
These were the ravaging days of our love that seems to exist only in extremes, the mid part past innocence and before wisdom where we both fell into the ostentatious belief that all things would last forever not just in memory but in experience, like these days were movies not moments. And we sat together on this beautiful day where you had said this thing I was sure was devastating and that it would last forever and everything would be shattered and you asked me what was wrong and I said nothing. Literally “nothing” and now it is quite literally nothing as I can no longer remember what was said or how many small non-swords cut into me that day or any other day.
The seriousness of my truth in that moment is really the only thing that still lingers in my being and I am unscarred because I am still young and all parts of me will heal. The thing about truth is that is it is not solid, it is not enduring - it is a peach in the heat and one moment it is the epitome of desire; the next it is sticky and too soft and rotting and the hard pit of repulsion pokes it’s way through. Like the grass, like the words, like my nails in the skin pulling up the scabs from the wound like it’s a harvest.
What I am saying is holding onto our illusion longer than a moment will remove our ability to trust what we see and what it is that has come next. We will bite into the rotting peach that was once fresh and make ourselves sick on the unwillingness to move forward, to be in time as it is now and what it needs from us now. We will sicken ourselves holding on and that is how we stay in the twilight moments of life, romanticizing the in between of what we really want. Always saying nothing because we think it gives us permission to let anything be what we want without having to look at what we want.
That day under the tree I wanted for you to know what you were saying, I wanted for you to read my mind… I yearned for things that were always elusive of a real thing, that absolved me of my own responsibility. I did not want to not hurt or to be wrong or to misunderstand. I did not want to be harder or unaffected by the something that has faded to nothing.
I never wish I had eaten the peach sooner, I always wish it had stayed the same.
As I grow I learn how to want real things. Things I can touch within myself, things that can be truly changed by me - or things that can really change me. Perhaps to even want to not change but simply accept.
I look back and touch upon myself through this memory. Somehow I remember the angle of the sun and the blanket we brought and the wine we drank. The pit of the forgotten peach grows into a tree when it’s left in the right place and I never needed to wish for it to not rot, maybe I never need to wish for anything. Maybe wanting is a purgatory and remembering is a future forgiveness for present pain.