if you're not a penguin...shut it - Floating My OWN Boat v.2

He owns that piece of me that fit so neatly inside of him. That hot messy wild thing that, like all of our love stories, is half invention and half truth. Real, yet somehow mythic.

We don't show that piece to many people and the ones who see it, never forget it. They have that on you for the rest of your days, unchanging even though you have changed, existing even unspoken. They've seen you naked, vulnerable, pathetic, needy. In lust. Fear. Pain. Heat. You both know it. It lives with you from that point forward.

Sometimes it's hard not to want that self back. Days and nights when you look inside and just cannot understand how you could have given that piece of yourself to someone who, mostly now, you barely even recognize.

I want that private self back. Not to reclaim ownership but back to a place where no one else ever held it. I want my blood and guts to come home where I can hide it away again and keep it safe, although I know it can never be.

In the light of a fall day, feet pounding the dirt, I come to understand that he was the perfect fit in the particular context I had needed all my life. Longed for. Inevitable. He was my heroic territory and my occupation of him tore down and rebuilt something enduring, it's intensity simultaneously burning and healing a stunted part of me.

It is that route to some essential part of me that I didn't fully recognize or understand that he brought an almost complete set of directions for. The mirroring effect that allowed me to see myself as he saw me, to see a me I'd never seen or even believed could exist. To fall in love with his version of me - that I was the most beloved and gorgeous creature in all the world.

Ending, I see that I no longer amaze and entrall myself and it breaks my heart. But, still, that which now breathes within me retains it's newfound health.

I have learned to embrace it when it comes. I learned that I can give my vulnerability and my nakedness to another person and still be strong. Still be free.

But with new knowledge comes new questions. Giving even a small piece of this new knowledge to another suddenly engenders a new need...

...how to weather what feels like a whole new breed of rejection.