On the right thing

What they do tell you, but you don’t believe them for a very long time, is that doing the right thing is hard. That doing the right thing can be so hard it twists itself into feeling like the wrong thing. That it will keep you up at night, months later, and remind you of being poisoned in the desert. Somehow everything always goes back to that night. Like we never really left.

I try not to think about you there, try not to think about the things that were mine being someone else’s. He tells me it’s a part of the letting go, tells me its a part of the process, tells me ‘replace’ is an ugly word to use for something like this. He can smell it on me when I wake up angry, when I wake up adrift and out to sea.

I have to right my compass, fly back home again. Try and do the right thing.

I read an essay about how possessions hold a certain power over us. How a duvet cover bought on a Tuesday in a different life is like a talisman linking lives together. And maybe that’s why I get it so severely. Maybe its the touching of my things that wakes me up in the night. But, it shouldn’t matter what. We have to find new things to care about and new places to sleep at night. Nothing is mine, save for this view.

In October the sea is less electric blue and more a steely woolen blue. Still when the clouds clear, and they always do, still it glitters like piles of halite. But, what does the sea care what color of blue it may be? Does it even know it? And if it did, would it want to be a bluer blue, or does it even care to glitter in the afternoon?

At the end of the conversation, his advice and my mother’s advice is the same. “Come from a place of love. Do the right thing and send love.”