Wraith

Dreams are anything but sweet these days. No sugar plums in sight. The wee hours of every morning arrive in the same way for me:  The hazy recollection of a business presentation in a perpetual state of reform. The message we need to convey is always just out of reach. I’m searching for the right words.  As my consciousness rises, the criticality of this work plunges. Tell me again why we need to communicate this information?  Haven’t we been here before?  What feels like non-fiction in this nightmare becomes fiction as I wake. And yet, there’s no relief because there’s something I’m trying to solve for. I know it.

It’s all about him.  He needs something and I don’t know what it is.  I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know either.  But it consumes him. It drives him, this quest for the missing piece to the puzzle of himself, the one that will allow him to love who he is, to shape who he becomes.  In order to find it he’s willing to break my rules.  In the process he’s nearly broken me.

I’m thinking of my favorite line from Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain”:  “If you can’t fix it, you got a stand it.”  My head tells me I can’t fix him.  My heart tells me to be for him the one who stands him.  But in my brokenness, I can’t see how it’s possible to give him the love he desperately needs because I’m caught up in my need to exert my authority, to call out every infraction of the rules, every act of defiance in vain attempts to salvage my own dignity.

This is where it gets hard.  In order to love him completely, to give him exactly what he needs from me, I need to stop thinking about myself.  My demands for respect and obedience not only weaken me, but act as the bellows fueling the fire of shame and disappointment that’s already raging in his soul. When I put my pride on the shelf, I’m able to clearly see that yes, in fact, he knows everything I’m saying is true. I’m able to see how much he is hurting. When I suppress the need to let him know I know, those flames he’s unable to reconcile in himself die back to smoldering.

While I’ve spent years trying to solve for him, to head him off at the pass, we’re at the crossroads anyway.  Here my power is in being wordlessly watchful; my weapon is love. By invoking some selective aphony, I’m able to foster euphony. And it is possible to love and maintain my dignity at the same time. It’s possible to stand it.

As we move into the holidays, it’s in heavenly peace that I should be sleeping. So I’m emancipating myself from the demons inside me (or trying to anyway) and watching what happens. 

He can only break me if I let him.