Oh, God, I don’t want to hurt anymore. I don’t want to call this into existence, but I have such a feeling in me. I don’t quite recognize it. What is this expansive, airy horror, this great big, still, spreading thing? I think it’s fear. Fear of the coming pain if what I am afraid is true is, indeed, true. It’s the anticipation of the agony. It’s seeing the torturer coming, seeing the despair in the distance that has no obstacles to stop it from reaching me. After so many years of pain and despair and loneliness, barely making it through sometimes, I can’t bear the promise of more of it. I’m afraid of the pain. I can hear the boots ringing out as they come for me, the sound of the key in the lock, the grating of the door. I’m so afraid of the pain that could be coming for me. It’s going to hurt so much.
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And my heart will not break. It will not rip or tear or fall apart. It will merely shrink back, lose the volume it took with love. It will take on the hardness of porous coal or the tough stringiness of a piece of gristle. And I may not even cry. Thirty years of being alone trumps a few glorious weeks of being in love and feeling safe and whole and free. And I will not speak of it to my friends or to my parents. I will not even speak of it to myself. It will be as if he never existed. And if this love does end in pain as it must if it does end, then I, who has valued even pain and trial for the truth of the experience, will say it would have been better never to have loved, never to have met him and seen the locked door of my dreams creak open at last to shower me with the warmth and light of possibility. A few weeks of love are not worth more pain after a lifetime of it. And I will survive and not weep and have nowhere to go from the pain of the loss. And no one will see the crack. Because there will be no crack. You can’t be alone for thirty years and not have learned how to be alone again. Force of habit.
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But oh, God, please, I don’t want to hurt. Please say you will not go from my side, that you will not leave me for one moment if this comes to pass. Bring him the love he is looking for, peace and joy and wisdom in his every decision. Fill him up with life and hope and faith. I love him, I love him, I love him. Does it make any difference that I love him? I love him. I lift him up to you and pray that he makes the right decision and has unprecedented wisdom straight from your head. Oh, give him the life he deserves. He is so wonderful and so honorable and worthy of such respect. Show him the path to what he wants, even if it is away from me. And should it indeed lead him away from me, shore up my heart to bear the reasons for it from his mouth, and please don’t leave me in the echoing silence left in his wake. I am afraid of the pain.
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