bareknuckle

I tell myself that things are settled but there's some sense in me that that's not quite true.  A lingering.  Is there something left to say?  Some hope not yet extinguished?  I return often to this trying to find some peace with how we left it.

Framed one way, it came as a final test.  Defining a boundary for myself, and respecting it.  Whatever the cost.  The cost is so high though.  And I circle back and put my fingers on the keys lightly thinking heavily.  I lose and gain my nerve in anthems and ballads. 

I try to outthink my way back.  An old party trick.  There are other frames, other mattes, I could make a collage of them.  Some offer a portal, true.  But at the threshold I still have to answer the koan of the first frame: Am I letting love or missing love erase my boundaries?  There's rage there, in that last question.  And so I wander away again, rapped upon the back of both hands with a ruler.  Stung through to the shoulderblades.

This is my lesson and I continue to learn it, slowly.  Angrily.  Stubbornly.