I really want the purple bar this year. I do. Doing this has help tide me over in the most stressful period of my life I can ever recall. I am scared out of my mind right now. Anyway, writing has grounded and focused me, and that’s good. I won’t used this pov again that is for sure — it’s more of the kind of pov one writes in a journal of sorts. But I did, for this. It has aspects that are part morality tale, part hopeful and part sad. It has life and death, it has remorse and looking forward. It’s a novel about trying to stay alive. Anyway, wish me luck on the last 3,000. I will get there. Today and tonight.
The flower that poet’s love. From my garden.
An excerpt:
Be wise when you give away your affections in this life.
Be wiser than I was, when you give yourself away in marriage to someone. Be like my grandmother was full of grace, in beaded lace. Be kind like my grandfather who she called “Spen.”
Look to your happiest ancestors, and they can teach you everything about the right way to live.
The day we walked across the threshold of the house I thought I would be my happiest here. I wanted a house like my grandparent’s had had. Full of everything anyone ever needed. I tried very hard to build something like that. The truth now that I look back was that he never wanted what I wanted out of life. He used his hand and his gestures to brush me and my dreams aside until I grew silent and meek and was no longer able to say anything.
It took me a long time to understand that he had never really cared.
I knew that this one year, I was going to have more than one Christmas tree. I kept thinking that since it was my last Christmas in the house I wanted to do it right. At least I was going to try.
* * *
When my husband told me his parent’s house was the center of his universe I realized that I wasn’t. I had been deluding my self, I supposed, for years. It hurt me to the center of my heart when he said that. I had given him twenty seven years of my life.
I had pledged my troth to him.
I had wanted a baby with him. I had wanted a rose-covered cottage with him.
He never loved me.
That is how I knew I had to leave him. It took me a long time to make up my mind before I could do it. I’d made some kind of pact with him in my mind that I’d stand by him, and for years and years I did this. I made a pact with him that I would stand by him through the death of his parents, and I did. I did it because I loved him, and because I worried about him. The truth is though, those feelings didn’t go both ways. My heart was the one that always reached for his. His never knew how to reach toward mine.”
back later, as finish arrives.
VALENTINE BONNAIRE - WRITER 