more (mourning)

I want so much to take the burden from her shoulders, to make it mine somehow. Trade my easier place for her harder place. Take her back even, the ultimate easing of her burden. The self-sacrificial, a la Abraham, truest form of love? She raged at me, called me musekinin, the facts are clear, her position so lonely, so fragile, and I could sweep her back up in our future. I want to take her pain. Before, I nearly took her decision from her, made it myself—then too, it was about removing her from harm’s way. The irony, of course, that in those early days the decision would have been against us, it would have negated us to spare her—now I must, as it were, negate myself, this odd, shifting Truth I’ve found in our wreckage, this notion of needing to be unsettled, ‘the wisdom of insecurity’, of needing a shake up.
Taking her back would run against that, because I’m already too much for her now, let alone when I get up a head of steam, when I’m really moving.
I don’t like to think, these mellower days, of people as simply not smart or good enough. It runs contrary to my nature, really. I mean we’re all dealt a hand and we do with it what we can—perhaps I’m too much, ultimately, a materialist to think much of a notion of worthiness. But the fact remains, she’s not smart enough for me. I thought it wouldn’t matter, because I love her so, her smile dazzles me so, melts me so. But ultimately it means the range of what I express to her gets narrower: Because it’s rarely worth the Long Explain, I just don’t say it at all, just let the thought pass by—but then what we share becomes a smaller part of me, and as I get better at it, at sculpting our space, well I start to censor it further upstream, so it starts to feel more and more okay, but what’s missing still looms.
I don’t think I need someone as obsessively analytic, certainly—but someone who can go there with me when I need to be there, and who is willing to come with me especially as I make meaning from our mad fumblings, our relationship. Someone who can’t do that simply misses me.
With grief, I say I have to let her go. Despite how she crumbled tonight, on the phone, how naked and alone and afraid she feels now, how she can’t see any exits that don’t terrify her. My dear, my baby, my hon, sweet girl, monkey girl, darling darling dear thing.
I fear most desperately that I’ve done your glorious pure heart some damage through all this. Pulled you into a cultural meat grinder you didn’t have a chance of understanding and so it predictably chewed you up. All that, maybe, is my elaborate way of blaming myself, so that we don’t have to blame you for failing to overcome your immaturity so many times, through so many conflicts. But…I knew you, who you were, what you offered. Which is what makes the failure feel like mine. I knew.