Useless Love

There is something in the way the light hits the rain and the fog and the dark of a storm that apparently takes me right back to how it was. I can see the patchwork quilt that blocks the view out of the back window of the bedroom cabin. I can smell the damp, as I get stoned enough to curl up in a ball, huddled into a corner, trying to ignore the din of the rain, and the fear for my family – the Boy and the Girl that sleep up in the front overhead cabin. I am too tired to fight anymore. The twinkly lights turned on providing some light on the matter. The guitar taking up all the room by my feet, never his. The bags encroaching on the slither of room I have to sleep. His arm around me, my hand tucked around his gently. He gets up and plays the guitar. Girl From The North Country rings out. “See she has a coat so warm….” he sings with that deep rich voice of his. That song used to make me cry. Now it just makes me feel disappointed. Let down. Lost. What use is useless love?

What use is a love that has no point? That fails at every turn? That doesn’t DO the things love should do? That makes grudging sacrifices and denies that anything more is needed to keep it alive and burning. That kind of love is useless. It should be put out of its misery. What kind of love is it that asks and demands, that yearns and burns and desires, but fails to protect, to stand up, to be a human about it? That fails to strive to provide a little nest for Love to grow up in?

It is a crippled and botched love. It is a love that is missing it’s guts and is all heart. It is soulless. It is useless. It is poor and pitiful. It limps along on affection, and is stymied by lack of rejection of everything it fails to achieve.

It is the kind of love that plans to plan tomorrow, and takes all the juice out of today. It is the kind of love that, chin on outstretched hands, cherubic-like listens, but fails to see the writing on the wall.

Self centered love. Obsessed and clutching at heart strings. Adoring, failing. Sweetly lazing around on Sunday afternoons, wasting them one after another: petals plucked from a flower.

I thought my heart was going to explode I was so angry. It was the last string pinged. Fractured. Tension gone wrong. Ends flying, slashing at what might have been.

I would have given it all up for you. Tolerated. Put aside. Not denied you. And yet…….

the woman you married…..

……………………..and yet preferred me to….

………………………………….allegedly…….

…………………………………………….left for me…..

……when calling the cops…..when making sure we were stopped….

risking my child……

after stealing my guitars…..and calling me a slut…and accusing me of leading YOU astray, poor lamb, poor babe, of passing you drugs, of getting you drunk, of being a Jezabel in blue jeans……her fat blank face blinking cowlike…..chewing the cud of revenge, blaming me for you……

…….was crowned….not malicious.

Stupid, yes. Irritating, yes…but not malicious. Not malicious. Not malicious!

Honey, after having to deal with cops, having to risk my Boy being dragged off to some illegal cage because his granddaddy was not allowed to homestead with his Japanese girlfriend, despite being a soldier of good standing, good enough to die for Uncle Sam, but not good enough to have his free will (damn them all) , and marry her, thus making it all complicated for his children and their children’s children, the pain down the line….having to risk my son because her white fat cow ass was mean and maliciously vindictive towards a child and a woman she had never met, so righteous in her Christianity. So upright. In good standing. Dull dull chewing on my ankle. Not fit to kiss my son’s tattered highway boots. ….

Defending her to me was the last thing you ever did to me. It was t.t.t.t.t.t…that’s all folks! It was the big blotch on the landscape. It was the no no. It was not advised. It was the catalyst for me and him to go go go go go go…away from you.

And now you are gone. Drunk yourself to death. Drugged yourself to death. Fought yourself to death without me. I was not the one tempting you. I am no Eve. Heck I am a runaway bride. A refuser. I hater of men. All this despite the fact my evil influence had departed!

Sometime before you died, you wrote to me, you wrote it publicly here and there, that she was indeed ‘malicious’, in an offering to appease my anger. Too late. Too little. Too much time after.

And now these days after, instead of looking out on the rain missing you, I look out there thinking that if my soul ever sees yours in some Elysian Fields hereafter, you had better be the one running.

I have had enough crying.