Made some marmalade.

Here is a story that is not true, not even a little bit.

I have been having conversations with someone lately, sometimes letter exchanges, about the loss of love. We are sharing our own thoughts about just what happened and hoping to give the other advice, each in our own situations, comparing and differing, sifting and seeking what we might offer the other. Because we have these messes, ones that we thought were not nearly so large as love, but that somehow the other half did not see enough to pass. Not the kinds of messes like cheating on a partner, but also not the kinds like "I hate the way you chew your food," not anything like that. Nothing like either of those things, but somehow, you know. The messes are torrents. And we have been attempting to aid each other in understanding how a mess has somehow initiated the kind of purposeful insensitivity you would not think possible in that other person, the kind that either freezes or just dissolves all else.

This person asks me how I move forward. Moving forward is a well to draw. And I have a whole list of things to offer, a guide that I imagine a person could follow. I would suggest to stop making the kinds of meals you would love together. Big salads with hot, fried tofu, cheesy honey eggs, halibut. Certain chocolates. Do not make the kinds of foods that you know from them, it is as if eating your own sorrow. Do not listen to the pop songs you danced to at their house. More, do not pin their picture of a nose to the walls of your new house, or turn in your hands a note they left you when they visited your cafe years ago, nor every other note you have kept. And do not listen to your own thoughts when you are driving through the night, when what you feel in the air of the car is the way you would kiss their fingers when they were your passenger. But do not let your work sit, or decline your friends. Make yourself make things. Throw your soul back into the air.

Take your walks. These things looked a cinematic montage where a person would reorder themselves. A long while ago I read a book called Surprised By Joy, something that I took to out of the wake of the loss of my Great Uncle Herman. The context of the book is different from his death, of course, but the thoughts there gave me myself. They were not suggesting for one to remake the way they position themselves in the world, only to see what that world actually is in truth. And I let it try me again this time, but could find nothing. None of the things I thought were true, for it is that very truth, a kernel, carbon, pressed and magnetized and not something I have been able to approach any longer. I would not write these things though, not for a person who needs the opposite. Elsewhere than for this one whom I was having these exchanges with, I would write of the slow realization that, despite your insistence on the truth you saw, despite yourself, when you drag through your own sands, you see that every time you came between you and that person, that person put someone else between you and them. There is no advice to give when what is being forced upon you is the way that truth lacks in your world, no matter how you may perceive its conception. But I would not say this. Neither would I offer those items of optimism, that wholesome guide. Sometimes realism needs a magic in between. I would say, then, only if you really want to, make yourself breakfast for every meal, because why not. When you wake up in the dark, keep with your coffee and Cat Stevens while you watch out your window as the world grows grey with light. Listen, still.