feeling sorry, and other reasons for mixing metaphors

I am sorry, but not regretful
I am feeling sorry
but
These days you can't tell the victim in me that there is a whole lot left to lose. As I get used to all the ways people victimize and are victims the more I think about how much we have all lost along the way.
And I realize
I keep close to what could hurt me
confusing it with what might love me.

What might love be, and where?
There is no way to stop asking. I would be hopeless and lost without this question to anchor or rudder. It is the compass and the Northern Star hanging low over Alaska's Anchorage, the very place I was born: under this question.
And you, my beloved, are caught up in it. Between the sails and the stars. Like the youngest stow away, crawling through the potato sacks of my story and loving every minute that takes us further from the familiar shore.
Insight is not dispersed with any kind of regularity.
the nerves and anger and anxiety will have to be managed, or at least embraced, as gentle friends come to warn--the chorus in a Greek tragedy, telling what we keep forgetting about the story and the ways it will go. But they are no more than that. They are not the players, we are, more important than what they portend or forebear.
We are looking toward the end of the performance because endings are a great accountability.

So I have been thinking more about endings and reworking what I think about death.
The death of a hatred is called love.
The death of night means the world keeps turning.
The death of a savior means resurrection.
Death is not the end of the story. That is not how the story ends.
The death of despair is hope
The death of hunger is fullness
The death of a tree in all its carbon glory is a fire-a pentecost
and flames lick the heads of those called to hold one another,
hold one another's feet to the fire.
The death of a broken union is called a divorce. Death is a great accountability at times. It keeps track of faults and ending and frailties and beginnings. It is a vengeance brought about by a God who chooses life, makes it go on or go out.

So, no: I'm not thinking about suicide. I'm thinking about the way death is a part of life and that knowing this makes all the difference.
There are so many things to see and find and places to put my self
my whole self
just as soon as I get it all there, find it there, right where I want to be and even though I thought I'd never make it to 30, or past that, I am excited and really hoping that I might!

All this time I thought I was afraid of the one big death and so I was living all the tiny deaths. I am, if I am honest, rarely afraid of dying because I see it so far off. Instead I am afraid of all the little deaths along the way: the ways I let go my biggest hopes, waking dreams and deepest feelings and best thoughts. Those are the deaths that seem to finish, seem like life is finished or at least fucking with me. These are only the little endings and mediocre dead ends that leave me maimed or scarred but very very scared.

I've apologized too many times
wanting desperately to make loving me into less of a choice
for you,
to make you love
anything or everything because I wanted you to love me too--
not best or first but at least, at last.
I hoped it would be the last thing:
that you would love me.
That in some final desperate move you would love me
but now I see that I could be first in some
One's mind,
part of the first thought and the last thought.
That You can
see me arrive and think first (feel first)
that I am here, that I, me, my self
(not only my faults, missing parts
jettisoned, triaged ambitions)
but my best whole broken mess is here.
That
You don't have to stop thinking of yourself--You can hold on to yourself and hold on, and
still see me clearly.

It is as if there are hundreds of thoughts in the room and
you know there are
but they are not overwhelming because we are curious about each other--not displacing each other.

A chemical reaction happens when so many tiny pieces react to one another:
I will learn to do this too::
to see your ideas and calculations on the chalkboard and among all of Einstien's equations choose to let yours matter, not before my story or my work but alongside it, part of it
helping it along toward our greatest discovery--
the great equation--
the balance of all things bonded after breaking down because we added just enough of some mysterious thing to what was
compounded since it all began and there will be breaking, splitting, new bonds and perhaps smoke or combustion from the friction of our
mutual admiration.
If we observe over night, donning safety goggles and tending the burners
we may end up
with nothing but the powerful powder of ashes: a new thing from ancient things
and recognize it as
love.
You know the score: From ashes I have called you, dust to dust and all that
and I think those ashes from that story must be some fancy goddamn ashes to have composed something so perfectly as
us.
Think powdered sugar next time you hear those familiar words, think a dusting of pixies: a little dirty, sticky, messy, unexpected, earthy and fantastic muddy, wild and grimy stuff from which we arose
but in the end when the final word came: it is good
resounded.