I will take trying and failing to a half life, with safe half loves, any day.

Half of halves, portions and chunks of this or that heart.

A tearing off of you, a piece ripped from that one or this one.

So when I leave, there is a dull ache of one who has lost
a limb, a scab. When you leave, I miss one portion of my body.

No.

When I leave, I want you to feel the missing. When you leave, I want to feel with every every bit I have.

Take it all, so when you have left there is a deep gut-wrenching emptiness-- because I risked what having this means. You risked this (being oh so known by me).

Anything else but this is mocking what your heart has been made capable of.

I choose nothing if not this.

Here is the deal.

Even if I am angry, or defensive, or if you hit just a little too close to home---

I won't react.

-- I will not abuse the way I know people and use it as a shield, or wield it back against you.

I won't manipulate you.

I won't take something from you that you unintentionally gave me, unless you want me to have it.

I will keep secret from you the things I know about who you are, because you have the right to discover them and not be confronted with them from me.

You are quite welcome.

Miles to go until I sleep

I think it can be hard to maintain the intensity of conviction that a life-changing experience has on you. Or several. It starts to fade or seem far away.

We get bogged down by the details. I have student loans, and I don’t want to be homeless. I like exposed brick, I enjoy sushi, I like clean air. It is … nice… being around people who don’t have to think so hard to function, and it is refreshing just to be sometimes. People who don’t know what’s going on in my head. I can pretend for a second or so that this is what I want, and could maybe be satisfied. I want to make sure my parents are comfortable when they are older, I want to make sure I don’t die in a nursing home alone where they have been cited for elder abuse, and have taken away all the photographs away. It is nice sometimes to just be without considering everything so much, and focus on these ‘normalcies.’ This tempts me, but only slightly. When I get tired. And I do get tired. I get exhausted with the implications of evil in this world, the cruelty that this humanity is capable of. The cruelty that I am capable of.

It would be nice to be a participant, instead of being this observer. Which I have been accused of. Which I probably in all honesty am, and in all honesty know in my heart of hearts I am not able to undo. I feel like an imposter, watching all the people living their lives so easily. Sometimes I am jealous of that ease.

But I made a promise. Several.

I remember a particular turning point when a close relationship to me was shocked that I would ever consider going back to Uganda, and I realized that for him this was the equivalent of disaster tourism. For me it was the realization that this wasn’t ‘the developing world’ or ‘the third world’—it was simply the world.

How can you ever live knowing what you know and choose to do nothing? I ask this in earnest. What kind of cruelty would that be? Am I even capable of this?

I fiercely, fiercely fought to maintain my convictions, and it scares me to see them waning in other areas of my life. I am losing them, and it saddens me, and I mourn them.

But in this—it is a conviction of my life, and it has not changed, and will not really ever change. It can just seem far away when I am here, and consider what I have yet to do. There really is not enough time, and I am already saddened by the end of my life, because I know that no matter what I do, it will never have been adequate.

There is a scene in Schindler’s list where the only possession that Schindler kept was his wedding ring, and he breaks down weeping. “This could have saved … one more.”

Now I am no savior. But I damn well know I don’t want to have anything I love enough to hold on to as more valuable than the life of someone I could have affected had I not been selfish. Because I know myself, and I know that it is much much easier for me to make myself not fall in love (with a person, life-style, place) than it is to stop loving someone or thing. Whatever ‘this’ is—it could not possibly be more important or valuable than a human life—and I believe that with everything I am.