Thunder to remember

Two breakups in the space of a week, with a two year relationship and two month respectively. Months later a thunderstorm breaks me open and forces me to write.

Today I cried from the sky. The rain rained down like benediction and thunder crumpled overhead. My thoughts hurried across racing clouds, inking the greyness above with grief. My shoulders, marked each drop with a muscle - relaxing for the first time in days.

It takes lightning to think. Brain rippling with connections, light fluttering between cells. The brain uses electricity and we are nothing but machines. It takes thunder to remember thought’s grand implications.

For the first time in a while I find myself at full capacity, charging into territory marked off for incineration, my inclination to take this as far as I can, and watch the survivors straggle back with burns.

I didn’t realize how much I missed lightning.

---

Why? - Last night I lay awake ontop of my covers, heat pressing down on me like strangling hands. I’ve begun going to bed late, afraid of the time between drifting and dreaming, when with utter certainty you know your own soul. Last night I found myself asking why.

I know why I was in that relationship. I work better in company than solitude. Odd for an introvert but that’s how it is. I need community to guide me, lest alone I veer too far to fanaticism. I need others to care for, images of others to motivate me to move. You don’t need to do anything, just be there. I’ll do the rest.

I know why I was there. I crave support, physical, and emotional. I haven’t yet learned that love doesn’t mean leaning and company doesn’t mean security. I crave power and the power being given gives. I haven’t yet built the forms that will feed my own power. I am young and immature and want someone to play my games with me, so I needn’t play alone, endless inevitabilities wandering against each other, and both sides known.

I know why. That moment in the starfield when I felt promises pierce my chest. Wishing on a star for love. That moment when I watched the moon out my window after you’d hung up. The first moment I said I love you and your voice quivered like a harp string near breaking. When you stood between me and a second strike and growled. When you left for the summer. When you came back. That most beautiful love letter and a lightning storm full of gods.

I know. Small reasons, large reasons. I know.

It never crossed my mind to wonder why you were.

---

Much like life, grief compartmentalizes. The dancer gets moved through when I dance. The scientist finds resolution when I research, make a hypothesis, and reason things through.

So let’s take a moment to become infected. Let’s attempt to understand the whys.

I had only one guide on what she wanted and why she was here. It was piece she wrote freshman year, the most beautiful piece of writing I think I have ever read, made more so I’m sure by the fact that it was written about me. She said she could not fight a desire to go to war with me. To let the armies of our minds collide.

In the beginning they were forever colliding. Our ideas crashed against each other endlessly. Exciting ideas. New ideas. She introduced me to Bayesian reasoning, cognitive biases, metaethics - I brought her every awesome idea I encountered - and we would talk about them, debate them, and let the soldiers of our minds fall down on both sides. We had lightning.

Gradually as time went on it became exhausting, difficult to maintain. I began to get annoyed by her dirty tactics. She became aware of my biases, a whole host of them that I would acknowledge but refused to give up. We were, neither of us, often moved by the other’s arguments so that we could argue about the same thing over and over again until we would finally agree to disagree. A mountain of taboo subjects began to build up between us, and any argument that edged towards one of those big thoughts would be dropped.

Perhaps it is always like that in a relationship that spans years, this was my first.

There must have been other reasons she came in. This was her first partnering, novelty must have drawn her. Why not explore something new? Why not experience the most basic of human rituals. Why not test her hypotheses on how humans come together - what works?

That too would have faded with time. She learned what she liked. She learned what worked between us.

Both gone, what reason would she have had to stay save inertia?

---

I broke inertia. When it ended it was entirely my fault.

A month before I had been frustrated. This relationship had a strange balance. I did all the giving. I did all the taking. I remember a night when I was feeling especially emotional. “I feel so needy! Clingy! You never need anything and I’m always asking.” Later that night the other lover said the same thing to me. Odd how that goes.

I was also always giving. I initiated most conversation. I gave of my soul freely as only I can, and learned not to look for anything back. She was an insightful listener. She gave me her time and her attention, her presence and her intellect. She was like a rock.

I was always aware of power, and where we made an odd balance elsewhere, that balance didn’t translate. I struggled to feel adequate, equal, and failed. I was frustrated by this lack of power. The other lover gave me a view of what power felt like - and I desired more.

Frustrated, I brought up these things. I told her I had thought about breakup. That we were stagnating. That I wasn’t finding here what I was finding elsewhere. That I was worried I was only staying because of how obnoxious it would be to untangle our lives.

The next morning I woke up refreshed, having gotten those emotions off my chest, I remembered all the reasons. The good things. She was a rock, but she was my rock.

And when the other left me, I found myself clinging to that rock. So grateful that I had held onto the most valuable thing in my life.

But when she left a week later - who could I blame?

---

Much like life, grief compartmentalizes. I move through the dancer in dance. She’s so much sharper most of the time, promises prickling at what could have been. The scientist is just a constant pressure above my heart, an unexamined paradox. A simple truth to live with.

Give me the summer and I will have danced the dancer off. The other will take years to go away.

But every thunderstorm my heart will open, and remember. Rain will wash away regrets and charge my mind to learn from you whatever it must. Lightning will crackle across my mind and move me where I must be moved. Warrior poet that I am I will write then.

Today I cried from the sky. The rain rained down like benediction and thunder crumpled overhead. I remembered that I love you.

Then I remembered that it’s not enough.