Learning To Love You More
HELLO ASSIGNMENTS DISPLAYS LOVE GRANTS REPORTS SELECTIONS OLIVERS BOOK

 ASSIGNMENTS:

 

 

Assignment #70
Say goodbye.

Holly Jackson
Santa Cruz, California USA

REPORTS:

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Goodbye sweet little (doll)house with your white picket fence.
Goodbye doll self, brittle and opaque, painted and poised, infinitely breakable.
Goodbye to being shelved and filed.
Goodbye wonderful man.
Goodbye to your touch in the night, to the closeness of your body.
Goodbye to your snoring.
Goodbye to your beautiful hands, calloused by work and yet so remarkably gentle.
Goodbye to the safety I have known in your arms.
Goodbye to the safety of disappearing into you.
Goodbye to the certainty of being loved by you.
Goodbye security.
Goodbye beautiful children, you whom I love as deeply as if I had brought you into being.
Goodbye to the laughter of children, the spontaneity, your total immersion in the now.
Goodbye to the daily unfolding of your imaginations, the constant budding and blooming.
Goodbye to the screen door slamming all the time.
Goodbye resentment and empty sentiments.
Goodbye to all the plants I invariably forgot to water until it was too late.
Goodbye little kid-prints on the car windows.
Goodbye Elmer's glue and glitter and construction paper and blunted scissors.
Goodbye shadow of the skittish calico cat from next door, running along the fence.
Goodbye nice neighbor lady with your pies, cookies, cakes.
Goodbye whoosh of the cars past the window at night, casting beams of light through the blinds and across that floor which I helped to sand and stain, and over the shelves which hold treasures we found together, light dancing across the accumulated evidence of a symbiotic life, across the proof of "youandme."
Goodbye self-flagellation, discontent, denial.
Goodbye (stifled whispers in the night).
Goodbye critic.
Goodbye fear of the unknown.
Goodbye fear of the known.
Goodbye doubt.
Goodbye waiting room with its comfy chair and vapid magazines.
Goodbye life I thought I could inhabit. I gave you all I had, emptied, and could not refuel.
Goodbye void.
Goodbye 2008.