Acceptance

As I remember, he was looking right through me, as if invisible,

still holding the sad dignity and edging

estrangement of a young man.

But I was there –

standing in an infinite hour and wishing I wasn’t –

until I was there alone.

I sometimes wonder if I had really been my truest self or

if I had already been grated down to the simple nothingness

I once believed I was –

and I listened closely to a quiet sigh somewhere in the air,

and watched the door close behind that man.

I became sick for the three months that followed,

and still try to forget that feeling until I got well –

a feeling as cold as the wet winter

with a persistence like snow –

though, somehow, I knew that a necessary pruning would come,

and eventually it showed at my door.

I took time and space and gave myself grace whenever I could,

and cut myself free from the onerous fear

I knew I no longer needed to carry.

It took me time and time again to dwindle that sickness

to the nothingness I had mistaken for myself,

until I could see with a clear finality

that we were separate, at last.