Distant Glaciers

It has been a quiet season but there is a reason.

Many years ago I first felt the slow heartbeat of healing. Like everyone, I loved and then my heart was broken. The crack in my heart filled with the waters of loss and froze into a cold blade within it. A glacier of grief piercing my centre but numbed to far distance.

For years the seasons rolled on, but inside me was this shard of permafrost that no warmth could reach. The warm hearts of beautiful, wonderful, people searched within me but could only ever find an incomplete heart to dance with. I wished for whole-heartedness while being unable to look to the pain within myself.

Healing does have a pulse. For me it felt like that first brief summer where enough warmth and safety surrounded me for the glacier in my heart to melt slightly, shrink slightly, and let the river of loss flow clean once more. Naturally though, the numb winters would return, and the glacier would refreeze… but occupy less of my heart than before. A slow pulse of healing.

I have since realised that it is too slow and needs to speed up.

I am lucky enough to have had chances in my life to build a future with a wonderful, kind, beautiful, wise, and loving person. Everything I could ever ask for in a romantic partner has been there for me. I could see her planting the seeds of our future in some hopeful garden filled with warmth and love, but I couldn’t go there. The ice in my heart prevented me because it is the antithesis of that loving garden.

The recent realisation that my heart is incapable of moving into a loving future is a profound one. It changes everything. It means that no matter who I find to be with, no matter how perfect we may be together, I cannot enter that loving garden as I am now.

I’ve since been examining the ice in my heart. It isn’t made out of anything romantic or noble or necessary. It is solidified hate, hurt, trauma, blame, fear, disbelief, and hunger for justice. It is a shard of slowly weeping poison that eats away at the future.

So, time for new mission parameters. First priority: be free of this deadly fucking ice! Second priority: step into that garden of love – forever after. What could be more important than this?

In other words, it’s high time I learned how to properly forgive.