What is fulfillment? What does it mean to be fulfilled? Is it only something that comes from within or can you be fulfilled from the outside? I find that I am most creative when I am the least fulfilled. When my heart is hurting the only thing I can do is express it. Sometimes I can channel it into my art, sometimes I endlessly post on Facebook about my loss as though the emojis and comments can build a wall of protection around my soul until I am able to protect it myself. My far away army of foot soldiers manning the bastions while my tears fill the moat, my bereftness the alligators swimming in endless circles on guard against further attack. She was just gone, in a second, a breath. I held her as she passed and told her we would be together again someday that it was ok to leave me but it was a lie. It wasn't ok to leave me. I begged you every damn night "don't leave me, please don't leave me I love you so". But she did and I am left with all this. We were together for nearly fourteen years, that's a really long time, geez ha! most marriages these days don't even last that long and yet there you were, my best friend, by my side every day. We spent only a few days apart during those years, long thousand hour days. When I had a creative block she was there, the good the bad, when I was in demand and everyone thought I was the next big thing...and then when everyone realized that I wasn't. It didn't matter I had her by my side and they all could just piss off. I love ferociously, if you don't personally know me then you would never guess. I believe in loving openly, fiercely, without hiding or excuse, people, things, etc. That love is love! If I love you or anything really and you are close to me, you are going to hear about it. You are also going to hear a lot of I love you's, big hugs, I miss you's, and that sort of stuff. I didn't get any of that as a child from my mom and my dad died in a car crash when I was fourteen so I suppose I figured out at an early age that everyone leaves. Some leave of their own volition, some we have to take our own leave from to save them or ourselves, some are taken from us in a puff of smoke...and some, some are gone in one single breath. Through every loss I have been able to channel at least a portion of the fallout into some sort of artistic space dust. This time is no different except that I am allowing myself to hurt...deeply. Its a fine line I am walking and I know that, putting salt in my own wound just to feel the sting. It validates our bond somehow, as though the more I hurt the more valuable the relationship is...was. I threw myself into my abandon and decay project. I reveled in the decay, the peeling paint, the crumbling, the discarded, the "left behindness". Because it is me, I AM the "leftbehindness". Working the "Abandonment Issues" project has helped me fulfill myself, made me realize that her last breath is still inside me and will remain so. Made me realize that this beloved companion of mine lives on, she patters beside me as I walk the ruins, she sits at my knee as I edit, she sleeps beside me as I dream of colors and light filled rain. She reminds me to love ferociously, to love, and hug, and laugh because someday we will all draw our last breath to live on in someone else. We want that breath to breed fulfillment, fulfillment from the inside out which then in turn fulfills us from the outside. But first, we as humans, we grieve and we cry and lament, we feel...and then we let them go. I will see her again one day, my love, I will see her. I believe the pain from her leaving me is imposed over my work like a satiny patina, like maybe my viewers see something just outside my focal area. That's not dust on my sensor, it's Bella's last breath. It's time to let you go now, baby, I love you.
"But dreams come slow and they go so fast
You see her when you close your eyes
Maybe one day you'll understand why
Everything you touch surely dies
Only know you love her when you let her go
And you let her go..."
~Passenger~
Bella 2003-2018
"Abandonment Issues"
"Abandonment Issues"
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