October 11, 2018 (a poem)

October 11, 2018

If you had given me The List,

One year + five months ago,

of all of the things

I would be forced to give up

in order to quit drinking,

I would’ve laughed,

and cried,

and kept drinking.

I would never have set foot here

on this path of clarity

and miracle energy.

The List would have read:

The soccer team,

Sundays (as they are),

Invites out

from certain friends,

Micah,

Our apartment,

our whole entire

fucking

life

together

And at that

I would have stopped

Turned away

And refused

To take one more step

Because he was everything.

But what happened

was an unfolding

one loss at a time

Starting with weekends out

And ending with his gaze,

and breath,

and smile.

With every release,

Dark pieces crawled out from my gut

Into the space

that I am

At my core.

My light shone:

The darkness dissipated

Swallowed whole by my Spirit

See, light and love and truth

do not trump hate

They simply hug it,

And it vanishes.

And all of the space between

My past life and here,

Was just forty thousand hugs

That felt like Death,

Because each piece of that past had to die

By surrendering to the Light.

- (this does not mean that life is all Light

and rainbows now,

it means

My Core

is Pure Love

and everything else

is an Illusion.)

(10.11.18)