I Love You

(as she lives her last moments, he reminiscences of their times)

Photo - Irena Siwiak Atamewan

I see your dribble find its way to the pillow again.

I see you've browned the sheets again.

So much of you is waste now.

So much of you is unloveable.

I love you.

How we've let our veins connect to the other,

how I've let your good flow into me,

till I see you and I see myself,

and as you die, I let myself die too.

I love you.

Maybe the sun hasn't always been kind to you.

Maybe I've crushed your flowers too often before they bloomed.

I've seen glass breaking and

you holding your hands up helplessly to me.

I love you.

We have stumbled on straight roads,

we've fought for winter in the middle of spring,

we've carved scars with our words,

we've feasted on each other's blood & tissue.

I love you.

I have been mayhem in the midst of calm,

I've trusted the world against your word,

we've lost our stories as we entangled in each other's tales,

so much of us is in pieces, so much of us is a ruin.

I love you.

And I feel this rush of breeze,

has someone come to take you away?

Oh we loved the other because of a secret you & I knew -

the healers of broken wings are the hands which have broken them into two.

I love you.

Photo - Caroline Ida Ours

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Hear the poem -

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Which love story isn't tumultuous? And if it is a story which spans decades, the years of togetherness have necessarily to also be years of disagreements. But the will to ride over it all, irrespective, is a sign of incredible commitment. I'm not talking about physical violence or emotional scarring, I'm talking about situations which two people who are together will always find themselves in. The small bouts, the emotional scuffles, the inability to conclude on things - things which two people can either move on from breezily, or on what they can linger on and make them progressively big and disastrous. 

I have seen so many couples, who seem not to have a single thing which is common between them, but when you look at them, it's as if an invisible thread has tied them together in some kind of, what I like describing as, 'toughened love'. It's a transcendent emotion. Something in them fits into each other seamlessly, irrespective of the jagged parts.

When life ebbs, and what remains in the last moments are memories, it's always a 'feeling' which overrides all 'facts'. 

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Read about a film and a poem which talks about the passage of time when those who we love grow old in front of our eyes -

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