Moving on is hard.

Leaving behind the past is like trying to leave a limb behind. Whether it be old friends who have fallen like leaves by the wayside of time, old ways of being that no longer fit with a new soul, old wounds & sorrows that haunt you. Forgoing a huge part of yourself because it seemingly no longer has an obvious use yet you're still attached to it, is a huge mountain to crawl over. It's like leaving an entire leg behind and then trying to run, you can't. But you know you must let go of things long past alive so you can live now, in the present instead of carrying around the wounds, heartaches and even fond memories of the past. The memories cling to you like the smell of smoke after walking through fire. 

You're forced to crawl away slowly, painfully leaving a bloody trail reminding you of what you left behind, a giant piece of yourself. All you've known. A huge part of who you were, is now gone. 

You're left to recreate the next part of your life, figuring out who you are now without the familiar weight of the past guiding you. If anything, they moor you, locking you into a long forgotten way of being that may or may not serve your life as you are now. The truth about starting over is that it's terrifyingly blank if you don't already have an idea of who you are & where you want to go. If you do then count yourself lucky.  If you really are starting over, then hang on for a bumpy ride.  

At first you constantly feel the past haunting you like a sad, hungry ghost with a deep need to be seen, as if the past never left.  Please remember me, please come back with me now, things were better then. Just like one might think they feel a lost leg that it's still there, but it's not. Neither is your past but in your own mind, boiling over & over as you process the losses, the pain & the remnants of lust, cooking your thoughts down to a mushy vague feeling so that you cannot think clearly.  Dulled by the constant pangs of sadness or guilt, or the yearnings no longer being satisfied. You are consumed by what was and the fear that it may never be again.
Because truthfully, you miss it. It may have hurt then or felt better but it was familiar, it existed. It was real. Now you're lost without this framework helping you figure out what happens next. Will it, things, love, pain, experience happen again? There is great uncertainty & thus, loss. Real solitude as you begin again. 

It's only after you've been crawling for awhile and get far enough away from your past that it starts to fade into the background. It becomes a thin phantom of a memory wisping about instead of an ever present ghost trying to relive things gone by.  Reminding you of failures, fears & passion that you feel slipping sadly, longingly into the background of your soul, out of reach.  But for a long while as you move through the present, you feel every bump in the road and that reminds you that you no longer have that leg, or the past.  That it's gone and all you can do is remember it, miss it and then grieve it's departure from your life. And that is a truly heart-wrenching passage to go through, like carrying around the weight of your own sadness. 

4/27/22©Dm. 

Borrowed Image: Tareck Raffoul 

Love is a Solid thing~

A friend recently said something that hit me like a brilliant lighting bolt to my brain, waking it up underneath the mud and dirt caking it due to so many years of accumulated horseshit as a result of everything in my life and life in general.  We were talking about the complex and retarded dynamics of trying to be close with family as well as lovers, even when their dysfunctional habits made loving them difficult and painful.  She said, 'You can't connect to people who are slippery'.
Whoa. This stopped me right in my tracks.  When she said this we looked right at each other, paused for a moment realizing how true this was while laughing and congratulating the utter hilarity and profundity of that expression in all it's honesty and precision.  'Yeah, duh...of course, because they're slippery...You can't ever hold onto them, because they're always slipping away...Totally makes sense!!' Like it should just be obvious when encountering people like that, that things are not going to go well and one should just turn around and walk away out of self-preservation.
                               "WARNING<DANGER AREA>SLIPPERY!!

Beyond sounding humorous and metaphorical it was downright true! When I think of the people in my life most challenging to connect with, including family, namely the men, they were slippery.  Like a fish you think you've caught, repeatedly slipping from your hands every time you reach out for them again and again.  Eventually you realize, at least with fish, you ought to just throw it back and keep fishing, right?  But for some reason, as with me and some women, we have a blind spot when it comes to loving the wrong men and end up trying harder and ourselves fall down a slippery slope into foolishness and heartache. Like the scales on a fish's skin, they're flakey.
It's the perfect word to describe people who seem to be in your life, seem and pretend to care about you and seem like potential lovers and yet never pan out to anything solid that you can actually hold on to.

The funny thing is, the next day both of us reinterpreted it with different words through our own filters. I thought my friend had said, 'You can't LOVE someone who is slippery' and she thought she had said, ' You can't ATTACH to someone who is slippery'.  Thankfully she had written it on a note for me.  Hers was closer to her original sentence but still interesting how it went through our filters and came out different for each of us.  Either way, a good way to look at unavailable people to connect, love or attach to all around.

Slippery: emotionally weak, avoidant, deceptive, evasive, mysterious in a way that does not engage with others well.

Good healthy people are not slippery.  When people are in the right place and space in their lives for love and intimacy, they will not be evasive, deceptive and avoidant with their emotions while pretending to be interested.  If one is not healthy or aware of their own state at the moment, they may fall prey to caring for someone who is slippery and will end up getting hurt.  But it goes both ways.

Some people are sticky and cling to people because they are not in a strong or healthy place as well. Sticky people can make others feel smothered and oppressed, yet needed in a weird way that begets a co-dependent relationship.
Some are slippery and deceptively unavailable or hiding something that can make others feel avoided and yet constantly pulled in by deceitful behavior. Neither state is a good place to be in and will not produce a healthy relationship with anyone for very long.  So before you get involved with someone, check yourself and see how you are.  Are you slippery, sticky or balanced and ready for real intimacy?
Then you can ask yourself, your greater intuition if the person you want to connect with is slippery, sticky or flakey, then go forward from there.

I'm going to keep this in mind when I go out into my life, meeting with people.  If they seem slippery, I'm not even going to reach out for them, whatsoever...
Just keep fishing.

2/8/17©DanyaMosgofian