My best friend is a beautifully imperfect being, that I text all day in slack. It had to be before we really realized what we meant to each other when she first used the pumpkin emoji.
She has 4 kids and at the time was moving into her boyfriend's house. I have no kids and been alone for longer then I can remember. I squared the circle of my loneliness many moons ago. For the most part, I am alright in my own skin. But I would trip out, on how many things she had on her plate. To make things worst, she lives on the other side of the country, there is a 3 hour time difference, she is 3 hours ahead of me. So as my night is starting and I'm full of energy, sitting at the computer with my warm cup of green tea, ready to rant and rave about whatever is going on inside of me. She is ready to call it a night, a day full of kids, work, school, boyfriend coming home from work, and an endless sink full of dishes.
Despite all of this, or maybe because of all this. We would just chat about everything, her day, books, ideas, past relationships, and most of all we exchanged poetry. We had this practice of talking back and forth in poetic verses, trying to distill our experience and soul into a few lines. It became so heavy, that I would only open up slack when I was fully ready to give her lines the love and attention they deserved. This was at the end of the day when the moon was beginning to come out in the night sky.
There I was ready for the weight of all her being poured into those lines of poetry for the day, about this past toxic relationship, how numb and broken it made her. How she doesn't know if she even knows how to love. I sat there heavy, connected by my own emptiness and my past failed relationships, of me trying to outrun my own self, hiding, drinking, keeping everyone, and everything at an arms-length distance.
Trying to distill my felt experience into a few lines to send back. All I could say; I hear you, You are not alone. Everything else seemed meaningless or some kind of lesser version of reality. All I wanted to do was hold her hand and sit at the edge of the abyss. Words fail us, in time of the felt experience of another being. But yet if the words are true and the attention is pure, you can feel that other person on the other side of the planet, and know, just know deep inside your soul, that everything and I do mean everything is alright forever and ever.
As I sent my few heart-filled words back to her. She was still there, up at the witching hour, when every being is asleep but only those that know the night sings every dream into being are still up doing magical things.
She tells me that she is so tried, but still wants to play and sing with me. There is a moment in our exchange of telling each other everything under the moon, that she has hit a wall. And she sends me a pumpkin emoji, to tell me she turned into a pumpkin, that this magically night is over, its time for her to leave. I am sitting at my computer holding her glass slipper, wondering if a night like this will ever come again...
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Very beautiful! My goodness. I specially love this description of poetry
I can see the magic of the hour. Excellent freewrite.
=D