No Myth: the Burden and Blessing of Lost Love...

Was sad to see some posts today from folks hurting, struggling in the throes of lost love, or love unrequited. I am focused now on D Rose sequel, but still shopping Cucariva, and these themes are at the heart of the story. Those things I read today, hearkened this passage:

He’d come to regard himself as some sort of modern Sisyphus, forever consigned to pushing the boulder of his anguish. But this, he realized, was sheer hubris. His was hardly the world’s first broken heart.  Yes, it was his boulder to push, his road to sojourn. But unlike Sisyphus, who managed to reach the summit, only to watch the boulder careen back down, day after day, he neared no summit. Found no refuge. The pain had set it in from the moment he’d read the truth in her eyes. Hard and cold and abiding, and abide it he must, silently, and without complaint, for such was the way of things, and somewhere deep in his faltering soul, where faith and hope had run out of him like blood, he understood to do any less constituted the greatest sacrilege. A lesson he wouldn’t wish upon his greatest enemy, but a lesson no matter: that love most enduring, lived not in possession, but in loss. How easy had it been when they were together, when their hands so readily found the other’s, when with each embrace they’d known they’d found home. How much easier it would be now if the pain would apportion away with the passing days. If his love would ebb out with the tide, receding into the night, as had she. Until it was at worst a bittersweet memory, a melancholic and maybe one day even whimsical chapter in a story which could at long last turn a new page.

It was not to be. It had gotten no easier. Sometimes he dreamt of her, and in his dreams there was love, and she was there, and those dreams, and the first unknowing moments before awareness returned, were small bits of the paradise he’d lost. The moments thereafter were like losing her all over again. No, he would push his boulder for the rest of his days, but as he eyed the star-laced firmament on this evening, he understood in his bones he dare not curse the heavens, for in his anguish lived a blessing for the ages. It was never about having her, just loving her, and with or without her, he loved her still, and she was there in that way, inside him, and in this she had bestowed upon him not the harshest burden, but the greatest gift, and he dare not bear it with anything but the most profound gratitude.

Musclewood: a Labor of Love Revisited

In 2014, I set aside a mostly finished manuscript into which I had poured my heart. A dark but hopeful tale, and the reasons I stepped away from it were very personal, but it was something to which I knew I would always return. That's the way of things, after all. Our truth will always call us back home.

It needs an overhaul, and it'll take time. Anything worthwhile does. I'll keep you posted along the way, and as always, I'm grateful to have your support as I sojourn. To those of you beside me when I was living this--2012-2014--you have my thanks, and my heart, as ever.

Here's the opening. Musclewood.

“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” 

― Czesław Miłosz

​Buried things, it seems, have a knack for not remaining so.

In 1978, the small, Midwest town of Jacksonburg having agreed by democratic majority to submerge itself, watched as the Serpent River was dammed and its banks spilled over and flooded the entire municipality.  Once a prime source of commerce and life, the river now became an angel of death, consuming the town with indifference.  Sherriff’s deputies had performed a walk-through the evening prior, to ensure every living soul had in fact been evacuated. No official report exists confirming the result; one may perhaps assume in this town numbering fewer than 2000 souls, one gone missing would have been noteworthy, or perhaps even floated to the surface.