A JOURNEY NEITHER OF US COULD HAVE MADE ALONE

Your voice soothes me.
Your presence is a state of grace.
My soul is liberated and floating free.
Your energy illuminates me.
I am lost in the mahogany warmth
of your welcoming eyes.
How did we come so far together?

I don't remember it being an easy path to walk.
It seems there were as many detours and dead ends
as there were tangle-free places to put our feet.
I remember scrapes and falls
although distantly now, like echoes.
Sometimes you pushed me hard to know the true path
and I felt the panic of not being sure how to get us home.
Then I would leave your presence
while my body stayed in place
and I went inside myself
to that lonely, tiny closet where I could take comfort
from the old clothes and pillows
piled there in heaps.
The irony: my closet left you naked.

I sobbed.
I closed my eyes and prayed that your would be there
when I came back from my solitary journeys inside.
I could not have come back  if I hadn't loved you so much
and hadn't believed that you also loved me, deeply,
even while you struggled with your own fear.
the fear that perhaps I would not come back,
but would leave you stranded there in the dark woods,
all alone and feeling very naked and exposed.
Even without making a sound, your voice always called me back,
just as my voice called silently to you.
And I wanted to come back.
I knew that, as much as I needed you, you needed me, too.
None of us wants to be alone.

 
We have surely struggled,
sometimes with one another,
and more often, with ourselves. 
We have been on the brink of terror,
like that first first step out of an airplane on a parachute drop.
We truly made leaps of faith that the other would be there
to at least soften our fall.
And damned if we weren't right.
And damned if we didn't close even more of the gap
that keeps all of us hungry humans apart.
We did well and I'm proud of us.

Jim Morgan--June 3, 2013