Estrangement. E-strange-ment. To become a stranger to somebody.
You are a mere word but I need to say you to the world. I cling to the humanity in the language that felt you enough to have to form you. I wrap it around me like a hug.
Estrangement, why are you becoming so familiar to me? Why do you open before me like that cleft of light? What is this horizon you present? Your visions once dancing will not settle down. Once seen can never be unseen. You whisper temptingly of relief.
You make me feel old, old as a wind-worn chasm.
You are far beyond pain. You overshoot the nerves. You are the soul ripping slowly away from the body. I pretend to be horrified by you. And then I shrug.
You are my most heavily laden cherished ship drifting away without a rope to pull it back in. You are the spirit that slipped out of the building it haunted, the life that crawled out from beneath a rock, exposed.
You are the hostility we shared that cannot leave us and the mistakes we made that refused to be forgiven. You are the love that never could. You are the matter that no longer matters, the touch that no longer touches. You are a terrifying tenderness, a careful politeness. You are not a storming out the door. You are the detachment that lets me see us so coldly and clearly, sketching our simplest harshest outline, down to our barest bones. You are the trust that left without announcement, the things once sold that can no longer be bought.
(The light I cannot see you in. My words you can no longer read.)
Will I write you down in a diary like I did years before for another? I see the page before me, waiting blankly. Even knowing we might keep trying, maybe even fucking/laughing/sharing one more time, I can see my pen poised.
You make your call before it can happen. You just know. Until it is like we never were. I just need to say you to make you so. Estrangement, can I admit you?
Do not think I don’t know you, though it is before I can even stop to feel you. I know none of you can be true without that most bitter and cruel kernel of hope left inside me still lingering, like the sweetest strongest poison. Something I could never break down.
Estrangement. You are just my heart, turned inside out.
Desire undisciplined 