He walks.. I watch

I watched him walk towards me today

Feet splayed

Arms akimbo

Balancing carefully on the bricks of the lane leading home

Slow but sure

Not needing a hand to hold him steady

Watching each brick under his feet

And then watching me watch him walk

The slight frown on my face as I watch each careful shuffling step

The stubborn look in his eyes that says

I don’t need a mommy to hold my hand as I walk

Looking up and to the side as a bird flips past

As I wait

Hoping that the uneven bricks and the slush left behind by the rain doesn’t trip him up

Making sure that he sees the little bit of mud right outside the door

so he doesn’t get his shoes muddy

I watch,

worried but proud

Much as he must have watched me take my first steps as a toddler

My grandpa

The 95 year old who still won’t carry a stick

Labels are a BITCH

Labels are an odd thing..

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose…

Sure

But what happens when a Rose is told that it is nothing special but simply a member of a large family of the genus rosacea?

Does that not detract from THE thing that is a Red Rose in Full Bloom and reduce it to a “just a rose”?

I had a shitty relationship.. I was a fool in love with an ass who didn’t respect me.. I took everything he dished out for years and still loved him, fought with him, stayed with him... till I finally had enough and told him to fuck off…

That was my reality. I was an idiot in love as a teenager who let that idiocy define years of her adulthood too..

That was me. ME. As the actor who chose to behave in a certain manner and CHOSE to be  a certain way..

But now the label has been changed

Ironically by the same Ass who I told to fuck off from my life

The AB’s back in town for a flying visit.. and has recently been sitting through some seminars on domestic violence and abuse..

So he decided to assuage his guilty conscience and come to me to APOLOGISE for the emotional, mental and sexual abuse he put me through during our relationship....

A relationship that ended 7 years ago.. one that scarred me so badly that I’ve only recently  begun healing..

He came to APOLOGISE… 

and in the process took away my agency, my choice, MY decisions..

I was an Idiot in love with an ass

I’m now a Victim... a survivor of domestic violence whose abuser came back to apologise for his behaviour..

I’m no longer the person who made the wrong choices.. I’m a victim who  “suffered through abuse”

Who was this apology for anyway??

I was okay with my original label.. I was okay being the idiot who made bad relationship choices.. I was OKAY

Now I’m not

Now I find myself reliving everything about the years of our relationship.. wondering which part was my choice, where was it that I had the agency to do something but chose not to, and where were the parts where I could have done nothing…

isn't there some rule when it comes to shit like this that it should be the so called Victim who should ask for and lead the confrontation with the abuser and then walk away after receiving an apology feeling bolstered and vindicated???

i now feel more violated than i ever felt during the worst parts of our relationship... back then i was Choosing whether or not to pick a fight.. i was choosing to react or not react.. or maybe overreact if i felt emotionally wrought enough.. it was MY CHOICE

or so i believed..

now the apology has been given to me.. has been thrust at me really.. and i'm writing about it days after the fact, still dazed at what happened.. 

i didn't really react in front of him.. just gave him a polite hearing and said Okay.....and i let him go.. 

i wrote to him the next day.. with a long list of things that i REMEMBER hurting me.. asking whether he acknowledges and apologises for all of them..

got a reply saying. i apologise for all the things you've listed and things you've not...

and now i'm spiralling in my own head wondering what other abuse have I suffered that i didn't even KNOW was abusive behaviour??

labels are a BITCH i tell you

Soul Fury- Rumi- Coleman Barks

I ask the reed flute, why are you crying

How can there be such tears,

When nothing has been lost

The reed flute says, Not so

They took me from the lips

that once made sugar throughout my whole and silent body

Now I live letting others

Make crying sounds

With my emptiness

The trope of loss and emptiness is a strange one.

Even when the world sees you as an art form, making beautiful music that touches souls, the beauty may be coming from the depths of emptiness and deadening inside.. we believe that the music is divine, but it is ultimately the expression of the emptiness through the various holes torn through the reed’s body

The purpose of a story is not to hold your attention
but to put you back doing your work, inner and outer......

there's no shame in being crazy....

I'm not the one who broke you I'm not the one you should fear We got to move you darlin I thought I lost you somewhere But you were never really ever there at all



there are days when i stumble across a song whose lyrics are like a fist to the gut...



when does this end really???