My job at the moment is to learn how to be in relationship again. With another flawed human. One who like me, is old enough to have preferences and processes. Favorite dish sponges, certainty about laundry, and a schedule.

These get in the way of the urge to care and cook for one another. Stumbling around, at first we interpret this desire to serve as an attempt to pay for or earn something. Then we realize it is a kiss, a willful solitary surrender to togetherness.

But that recognition does not allow us to receive the gift, to be blessed by things that do not fit in our cupboards, to be sated by foreign foods.

Pushing the plates aside, we rush to tell each other everything, tumbling through the present to showcase the past. In our own cacophony we go unheard.

Why is it so important to speak? We recoil from ego, repudiating a primal need and ancient civility as a guilty indulgence.

The moorings are loose, draped across the water. We hold them only with our fingertips, looking away across distances we know we cannot measure.

We withdraw to lick our wounds, find them deeper than they seemed in the blanket of love.

In agony we screech the opposite of our desire. Hold the language tight. Do not create anything now.

The rage is hardly ours, and need not be spoken.

Go back…. what hard and hopeless hand hammered this pattern?

We, who are old enough to sense the inflection point are not yet wise enough to know that the surface hides not only the shame, but also the flint that has waited so long.

The gift that matters is the willingness to see your wounds reflected in my darkest waters.

What I am feeling is what was done to you.

Let me be your witness in a world impervious to us.