More Anthropomorphic Geology

Twice today, two diametrically disparate individuals have asked me the same question.

"Do you miss her?"

Interesting.

To understand the question, and the askers cannot, you have to understand the tumult of me and her. We were explosive and beautiful together. We were partners, team mates, lovers of passion and soul. I don't miss her.

I am not callous or heartless. If anything, though few would ever guess, I am excessively sensitive to a select few. Friends and lovers can attest to a softie of unmatched proportion lurking inside the shit talker, pool shark, beer guzzler, and guitar strangler.

Have you ever loved and missed? I move drunkenly that, with notable exception, you have not. As the puppy eyes and coy smiles are not love and neither the comfortable proximity, neither is the slight ache from a business weekend or a week of tittering argument "missing". I ask have you loved and missed the way I ask have lived and breathed the scent of the being and their absence?

I stood away from the world, chevalier defending a weak hearted damsel never out of distress. We loved as I drink this Stella here, thousands of miles from where we started and where we ended, habitually and with every fermion and quark of my being aching for more than can be taken in. The gushing emotion of a thousand parishioners exulting in their perceived divine truth could never match the trickle of her hand on my cheek. The slowest, weightiest glacier could never match the sheer force of our fights. She found a wellspring of passion I never knew I had. She found the fire that I repressed after it landed me in the cooler or in a heap of beaten flesh a few too many times. She loved me. She did, and though I still judge the validity of that particular catch-all word on the merits of her lacking, when I'm honest, I can admit that she loved me more than any other ever has.

Her eyes. Have you ever stood in a canyon and watched the rain fall on a sunny day? The azure sky, filled with falling diamonds, the golden grass, used to hold me transfixed in her eyes. She had beautiful eyes.

I don't miss her, nor do I love her. Let me explain.

When a man loses a limb, for reasons of nervous continuity, he still hurts in that limb. They are referred to as ghost pains, pains of limbs long incinerated in a heap of other removed human paraphernalia. Have you ever skinned a knee and felt the wind bite into it if it was exposed to the air? Imagine feeling the swirling wind, full of salt and wonder, smarting an open wound along your side and under your loving arm where a person had been amputated. She used to stand next to me, always cold, huddled against my thick side. When the conditions of war and so on tore us two apart, the ghost pains shot through that part of me, in my meaty side, where we had grown together and been torn asunder. I missed her as I would miss an aching and amputated leg, wishing she was there, or had never been there in the first place, but always stinging along the torn side.

So, though I have feelings that many who have never endured that life-losing love and love-losing life of her and I would mistake for loving and missing, I don't miss her or love her.

I feel emotions that those who live their life in shallow bobbing flotation on the surface of the puddle of feeling would mistake for love. I sometimes grow wistful for her arms in a manner that those who have never been mired in mercury waters and sand drifts far from home would mistake for missing her.

It's all just sad. I wish she had never been torn away or she had never been there in the first place. She is a ragged stump, rolled in salt and cauterized with hot iron. On the other hand, I think I got away more clean from our union than she did. I'm lucky, I guess. It could have been worse. I could have been her. I don't even know how she makes it through a single day.

I guess I should wrap this up. Sorry for the downer, just thoughts you have under a prairie sky thinking a thousand lives dead and gone back from the grave. Where will she turn back into dust and sand? I don't know. I have a feeling she already has. God save her.