and healed

My inner compass of...

...how to receive love,

what love does or doesn't look like,

what treatment is acceptable, unacceptable...

it's all muddy.

I have found myself thinking how my parents would judge these things for me. I am using their love as a compass, but I'm not sure anyone could measure up to how parents think their child should be loved. 

   This is me realizing that my own feelings are gone. 

    I am walking through life, this life, my life, other people's lives with memories of feelings, but nothing is real anymore. They are echoes.

     Like him.

Whatever sickness has made him what he is, is catching. He has taken his diseased paintbrush and painted me with it's tar. 

I can't see sweetness. I can't hear sweetness. I can't feel sweetness.

When I cry, it's for missing that.  

  When I thought I had found the love of my life, I was being tricked. 

Anytime my gut doubted what I was into, my heart was manipulated using it's very innocence and belief in love.

  Now, a year on from the moment I gathered enough self to let him go, I am starting to remember the missing pieces. 

  I have found friends who are true, who hold enough fire for me to see by, and who lay out blankets for me to rest on. 

    I've begun to wish for my heart back.  I have begun to imagine how I could be timeless again. 

I am thinking of unsung songs and not yet lived dreams. 

    I saw a man in the airport whose face had been injured and he was wearing bandages. I thought of how I was seeing him as wounded, but that all that was needed was some time and he would heal, without conscious effort. 

   It's like that, I hope. 

I keep applying balm, keep breathing and sleeping. 

   And one day, I will wake up new and healed.