This week’s prompt delves into the various aspects of loss and the volatile  emotions it can cause — and considers the possibility that there is a strong connection between loss and madness. I’m offering two pieces for this challenge. The first is a poem that considers loss without the madness — although making the decision to let the wrong person go from our lives could very possibly help keep us from going mad. The second piece is a work of prose that I actually posted in the past in connection with an entirely different challenge, but it seemed to fit this one so well that I thought it deserved a second bow. It does include a degree of madness connected with loss

DECISION

Let him go.
It’s time to admit you’ve been a fool
And take possession back of your own soul.

At first encounter
You saw the good was mixed with bad
The right choice then by now would make you glad.

But foolish child,
You were intrigued, so closer crept
And threw out counsel that you should have kept.

“Do not touch.”
Three words so easy to understand;
Unguardedly, you opened heart and hand.

It’s harder now,
But still you have to make the choice.
And this time listen to the wiser voice.

You call it love,
But such a love that’s unrequited
Just leaves the soul living life one-sided.

Even if
He claimed to share the love you feel,
The danger of forbidden fruit is real.

Let him go.
And pray the feelings soon will die.
To hope for more would be to live a lie.

Let him go.

---

---

SECOND THOUGHTS

I’ve thought about you countless times this past year. I sometimes wish I hadn’t been so hasty to make the decision. There are days when I wake up thinking how good it would be to still have you beside me for a few hours. And, of course, every time I make the curried chicken casserole I think about you. It’s downright lonely in the kitchen these days. And I don’t even cook most of the time. I do carry-out.

I don’t order from our favorite Chinese place, though, and I don’t go in there anymore because they almost always ask me, with sadness in their eyes, how I’m doing now that you’re gone. That gentle couple who own the place really got to like you. I think you were probably their favorite customer during the three years we ate there. I miss the Chinese place, and some of the other haunts we made our own. But I’m finding new interests and new friends, and things will work out.

But — sometimes — on a summer evening — when the windows are open to the gentle night air and someone’s laughter floats across the breeze, it reminds me of your laugh. I think that’s one of the things I miss most about you. You were so abandoned when you thought something was funny. You never held back.

But then, as well as I can remember, you never held back on any emotion. And that fact, of course, is what finally led me to make my decision. You just couldn’t seem to hold back on your feelings for all the other men in your life — even my best friend — a man I’d thought would have my back through thick and thin — especially after all we’d been through together in the war. But you were just too much for him. He fell just like all the others. And so I made the decision.

Yeah — as I consider it all again now — I know it was the right thing to do. It put a stop to the hurting for me and for all the rest of ’em too.

The only thing is that — on nights like tonight — with the fragrance of the roses you planted drifting in from the garden — and the radio playing an old song we used to dance to — well — I have to admit to myself at least — I do feel just a little sorry that I poisoned you.

---

 

To participate in this week’s challenge, visit “A Dash of Sunny.”

 

~~~