Truth

truth: truth feels more more when spelled without a capital t. capitals presume some kind of fixed point that real truth can't claim. perhaps only writers would think so. but the way words are spelled, capitals or no, punctuation, all of it resonates intensely with me as the subconscious text to what i am saying.

truth: mr. curry is not sick with bipolar right now.

truth: the fact of his wellness is terrifying, exhilarating, joyful, fearful, anxious, love filled, tentative, beautiful, embraced.

truth: mr. curry, himself without the disease that lights his brain up like a Halloween decoration in a MRI, is without a doubt the person i want to be around and enjoy being around more than any other person i've ever met, friend or lover. i love him so irreplaceably. everyone wants to believe you can be just as happy without the person you're in love with. i can be happy when mr. curry is ill. but just as happy? no, no i am not. in fact i am sometimes a drumbeat, a full moon, a stubbed toe away from despair. in fact i am also stubborn as hell, loyal, joyful, loving, grateful, sexual, strange and occasionally conniving as hell. i am a woman. and the woman i am when in the embrace- metaphorical and otherwise- of this love is more empowered. empowered because mr. curry sees me in a way that no one else does. he understands me. he knows me better than anyone and he still loves me unconditionally. that is powerful and i feel that power when i am plugged into it. when he is ill, i am powered down. of course i turn to other sources. but there is nothing like love, after all, is there. 

truth: mr. curry has been well for less than a month. for the better part of two years he has been sick, with only a handful of weeks clutched safety in between all those endless droning weeks of bipolar depression, irritability, fatigue, anger, irrational thinking, withdraw. 

truth: at one point about two years ago i realized if i didn't stop taking care of him, i was going to have a mental breakdown. i was close to a nervous breakdown. i wasn't sleeping. i was having night terrors like a toddler. i was shaking. i was losing weight. i was in physical pain, mental pain and spiritual pain. i felt dissociated. i felt despair. i felt nothing.  i had to let go. i did. have you ever had to let go of someone you'd die for? i have. our children, i told myself, sternly. focus. it was the right thing to do, i'd do it again and i probably will have to. and it still makes my stomach hurt.

truth: often the right thing to do can make my stomach hurt because it's so damn hard.

truth: often the right thing to do makes me feel more alive than any other thing because it's so damn right.

truth: i want to cram mr. curry in my mouth like a chocolate bar, i want to devour him because i am starving and the food may disappear at any moment. when he walks next to me i feel the electricity between us, warm. that same electric current is what i have to cut off when he is ill. the charge becomes life threatening. 

truth: if someone offered to make him well forever, if i would give up my hand, or a whole arm, i would.

but that isn't an option. and i'm not a child. so right here, and right now, the option is to love, or not to love. to love, to love, to love. there is not always black, or white. there is not always gray. sometimes there is only this unnamed color that hangs in the air and changes with the light, and you move yourself into the color and the light and the darkness, and you accept that not all colors have names, and not all truths are known.