Bruce Pollack — “Feeling Blue” — Blue Expo Collage Category | 1st Place

I’ve spent more harsh, cold nights in solitude than I can count now.

I find strength in myself. It was never being alone that intimidated me, but rather the fear of losing love. I once thought that love meant never giving up on someone, even at the expense of oneself… I was wrong. I no longer think that love comes from sacrifice. I’m not sure of its definition, but I like to think of myself as a student of its constant reconstruction throughout my life. I’m trying to live with more of it, to appreciate it as it is and not worry what it will be.

I think it’s the only thing that matters, the sanctity of love.

There are people I have come to love here, in this place. Forming a bond with someone that will inevitably end so quickly paints this beautiful mosaic of the here and now.

How much more present we are when we know something cannot possibly last?

How much more significant is each word, each breath when you know their limit is ever approaching?

Everything in here is a lesson in gratitude. In appreciating our finite lives.

I’m excited for you to start gratitude lists with Sky. It’s such an amazing way to view the world. I have lost so many of the resentments that I didn’t even know I had, simply by being grateful for what was instead of what I thought should have been.

They say that the #1 reason people become addicts, the core root of the problem, existentially, is the lack of purpose.

We are all only ever seeking a higher truth.

I don’t resent the path that I chose to search on. I know you and I have become unacquainted over the last few years, and I am sorry for that. In my absence, though, I have journeyed through myself and found someone that I am very proud to be, and I hope that you will come to know her, too. I’m still seeking, I believe I always will be but I’m trying to seek in different ways now. I see Sky and I see you and I’m filled with so much love that I can’t wait to give.

I’ve finished Combray, finally. You say the act of reading takes you back to those places of our childhood, but I tend to find my memories better in dreams. Our home and our islands live inside my dreams as vividly as Proust’s’ childhood memories.

I wonder why it is that I cannot find them as easily in my waking life as you? You connect the present back to the past so easily. Is it because, like Proust, you have honored so many of our memories by committing them to writing?

If ‘The Book’ is your object of memory, perhaps ‘The Storm’ is mine.

“When on summer evenings the melodious sky growls like a wild animal and everyone grumbles at the storm… I am the only one in ecstasy inhaling through the noise of the falling rain.” (pg. 190)

The Storm leads me back to the water, to the tarp-tie downs and swimming races to the buoy in the hammering rain. Wet canvas and slippery docks, watching pink lightning on top of boulder rocks, and sometimes I mourn the end of the storm because I feel more lost, less connected under blue skies, even though I know we have had so many of those too.

Maybe that’s always been the problem; I miss being together through the storms.