Holy Accident

There are mornings when I wake already reaching for you, though my hands are empty. I move through the day like someone walking through a half-remembered dream, every sound and shadow hinting at you, but never you.

I pray for you every day. Not the polite kind of prayer, but the fierce, secret kind. I pray that you are stronger, happier, smarter, healthier. I pray that somewhere, in a room I cannot see, you are laughing and whole. I pray even if it is without me.

And still, I miss you. I miss you until it becomes its own weather system, a storm that moves through my bones. I crave you like water. I crave you until I think I might dissolve. It’s disgusting and insane and mortifying, the way I still want you. In all my years I’ve never hated and loved someone so much. But even as I say -hate-… there is no hate. It is pure, ruinous love.

I have tried to move on. I have met men. But none of them carry the strange light you carry, the one that burned through my defenses and left a shape in me I cannot scrub out. You are not replaceable. I don’t even want to try anymore.

What is it, then, when you have this much to give and no place to give it? It’s tending a palace after the king has gone, polishing the stones, lighting the candles, waiting for footsteps that never come.

And yet, in the same breath, I can bless you. Even as I ache, I want you whole. Even as I miss you, I want you free. Even as I crave you, I whisper your name into the quiet like a prayer.

This is what it is when it isn’t. A holy accident.