I remember in the days leading up to and following my last break up, I wrote up pages and pages of prose in my iPhone notes app for close to a month trying to purge my anger! (Ok, and bewilderment that anyone can ever have the resolve to leave me). And read a lot, and I mean A LOT of Dorothy Parker. (She always calms me.) And then nothing. It was all over and I couldn't even bare to reread them without thinking how fickle relationships are and how unlike me it was to feel so strongly about one ending! So needless to say I never saved them.
Once in a while though I come across a poem that takes me back to those days, when I was trying to understand it all and reassure myself that it wasn't me, that there's absolutely nothing I could have done that would have guaranteed a different result. We were meant to end. I was too difficult to love. And most importantly, I should never have tried to make someone my home.
for women who are difficult to love
You are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn't you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can't make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.
-Warsan Shire
