The Resurrection

I kept referring to him as the love of my life until I realized I hadn't lived long enough.  I was tying myself down to a single experience, a single moment in time.  I had locked myself into the face of a dime when I had a full life of spare change left.  I held on to that time, locking myself in my own little snow globe, only to be shaken by the hands of somebody else, yet for the majority of time, collecting dust.  It was almost as if I just wanted to sit there, undisturbed, trapped in a cold memory, looking beautiful but never feeling that way.  I handed the responsibility of my love over to someone else and never asked took it back.  I was afraid to use my own love, like I hadn't bought and paid for it!  I almost felt guilty like I couldn't use the same love for another person.  But love is like DNA.  No two loves are the same.  They're not even reminiscent of one another.  Each journey into the depths of another soul has fingerprints like kisses, butterflies like hurricanes and clouds that New Yorkers could only see in Japan.  


I thought that I was demeaning my first love by attempting to have a second one, by learning to love subsequently, to love separately.  Who was I to love another man?  Who was I to love myself enough to deserve the love of more than one beating heart?  I was beating myself up, pulling my muscles into a coma, unused, atrophic with fear, crippled with the possibility of judgement.  I lived presently in the past tense knowing myself as the girl that loved instead of the girl that insisted on loving.  With all the verbiage on "true" love, I almost believed that loving again would be false, a counterfeit of currency that I had spent all in one place once upon a time.  I was torturing myself by letting my wounds stay wounds and not become stories.  How could I?  How could I let these scars remain marks of stretched time?  Why had I not let these caterpillars of my flesh become butterflies in the stomach of a man I have known, I have kissed, a man I have held?  It is my destiny to bloom, to transform, to evolve, to love wholeheartedly and a part of loving in that way is to love in the present tense, to keep loving.  I had denied myself the true in true love.  


The aching.
The fighting.
The sadness.
The lost time.
The time lost in waves of misdirection and angst.  I had loved myself, but not enough to love another again.  
Soul bare like my womb.  With the name of the buried etched in the corners of my veins and obituaries tattooed on the inside of my lips, speaking of the dead to scare off the living.
Overworked my own heart by not using it.  Overworked my own heart but clutching it so tight that it had to bleed through my fingertips. 
Left myself in a coma.  Men looking at me like I will never wake up again.
Any day now, they kept saying.  Any day now.


I woke up today, opened my heart like I opened my eyes.  
Let my heart beat between my breasts.
Let my butterflies sit in the palm of my hands to get their rest only to fly right onto his lips and be swallowed to flutter when he speaks my name.
Let my second love be as true as the first.  If not more beautiful, if not more succinct, if not more deliberate, if not more conscious and alive.
Let my second love resurrect me from beginning, play in the middle and end up at the end.
Whether in his arms or at the alter, I would find my way home only by first leaving it.
I am to love again.
I am to fall in love again.
I am to breathe again, to fall into the scent of another, to make memories on pillows that smell like angels, to make love from scratch with a set of ingredients no one has ever put together before. 
I am to live again by first understanding that a death in love is never eternal.  
Only the body can be so shallow but the soul is resilient.  
The soul is wanting.
The soul has always belonged to another, not to be deferred by a wrong turn, a lustful kiss or incapacitating sex.
I am to love again.
I am to fall again and find myself on the floor looking up at an angel reaching for my hand to carry me into the truest form of love there is for me - the resurrection.