Hieroglyphs

The Healing Time

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say
holy holy.

(© Pesha Joyce Gertler)

He told me he’d saved the love notes I’d written to him in sixth grade, buried in a Pringles potato chip can. That I was the image of the girl on the poster these many years since, as he fought on the battlefield of the wars of our generation. So, when for the third time in my life he came toward me with his heart in his hands, I was already his.

When I recognized so much of him matched the image of the man I had dreamed of and written about for the two years before he came into my life again -- even to the details of his given name and essential archetype -- I felt certain our hearts were meant to be entwined forever. He was the outer picture of my inner lover.

From the earliest moments of reconnection, we shared the places we were each wounded, and the hieroglyphs of scar tissue that had formed over these many years. We acknowledged that our love may face mighty challenge. Oh! but a love that has existed from the time you are eleven is made of a particular innocence and a potent sweetness.

As the trajectory of us moved through months of dreaming and living, it became more and more clear that how we each walk in this world was, perhaps, just too different. And holding the chasm of space in between became just too painful. This ending has been excruciating for me, even as I recognize the sacred rightness of it all.

It’s not mine to know how he may have been changed by us; for me he brought a healing to the ancient patterning of lifetimes. And in that way, this fierce pararescueman rescued me. Though my heart is still tender and mending, and I may never fully understand the myriad ways he has graced my life or why it has had to be how it has had to be, I do know I will always deeply love him.

And maybe what is most profoundly beautiful, most holy of all, is this…

Though we each knew all that stood between us, we hoped enough and trusted enough and loved enough to try.