VDay Roundup 7: Who Loves You
Admittedly, yesterday’s poem probably shouldn’t have been the last in this series, because you know, tough act to follow. But I took a thread from it and found something.
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you’d be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you’d have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you’re living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don’t want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day’s disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You’d have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you’re used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You’re spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven’t written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.
We’ve all been taught about soulmates, to explain that yearning that disturbs even a good day. But perhaps that yearning is just what it means to be a human, living with the ache or the hollows and knowing that it is part of who you are.
Love, just like happiness and water, takes the shape of that which holds it. And maybe it always leave space for the emptiness to have its place.
Maybe that is why books are written, maybe that’s why songs are sung.
Though I would be remiss if I don’t point the reframing of God in that poem. Which leads me to one more poem, which I just love because it reminds me that I am easter child even if, even if.
I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
I asked her if it was okay to be short
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
who knows where she picked that up