I Miss You, MK: Grief

Author's note: This is a love story. An explicit, adult-themed love story, but nonetheless a love story. There is plenty of consensual sex, lots of sheer nylons and stilettos, a great deal of teasing, some shoe dangling, the kind of sex that a woman and a man do or want to do to each other and assorted naughtiness.

At its core it is also a true story of gain and loss, of profound grief and of achingly deep love for an exceptional woman. A woman who was wanted but had not been found. A wearying belief that no such person existed had conspired to tease me into settling for......something else. Instead I had found nothing.

The discovery of her and of all her gifts profoundly changed my life. I would need volumes of vellum to document all of her delightful quirks, endearing traits and the indescribable joy she bestowed upon me.

The grief and the love are, in equal parts, responsible for the birth of this story. My efforts to cope with that loss became the beneficial force to transform my despair into something other than an empty Lagavulin bottle. And so you see before you my brief record of MK and some of what we shared.

Much of this story is true, much of it is fantasy - fantasy which I intended to fulfill with her and fantasy which I believe she intended to fulfill with me. I leave it to my gentle readers to sort fact from fiction. Or not.

I MISS YOU, MK: GRIEF

It is inevitable.

Like death and taxes.

But unlike death you had to suffer through it and unlike taxes you could not avoid it.

I grieved for a long, long time.

Silently. Stoically.

As I had been taught.

It didn't help.

Drinking, needless to say, didn't help.

As much as I wanted it to.

Remembering. Recollecting. Memories.

That kinda did.

Not that I had a choice. I could not suppress the many images, incidents and activities that blossomed spontaneously in my mind, despite my best efforts.

Always unbidden and often, but not exclusively, in the quiet hours of darkness when the siren, Sleep, failed to seduce me onto the shoals of unconsciousness. I could hear the foamy waves crashing on the dangerous rocks but was incapable of navigating into their stony embrace. I was more successful with a bottle.

It was during one of those nights, finding myself adrift on very forlorn waters, that I discovered that my recollections were disjointed, out of sequence, incomplete and I realized that I feared the loss of those memories more than I feared the stabbing pain of grief.

A poem, long remembered from my youth, kept haunting me.....why this one, I don't really know. But something in it called to me, expressed some part of what I was experiencing.

Confession

I did confess the changing skies;

That deep in the log the burned ash lies;

That time undoes the strongest ties;

But not that love like our love dies.

That grief more barren is than stone,

More deep than is the body's bone,

More living than the ripe seed sown

Are later truths I make my own.

What is there left for me to tell?

The prime fruit withers in the shell,

The soft dust thickens on the bell,

The heart learns neither late nor well.

John Dillon Husband

I did feel the barrenness of bone-deep grief and wondered if my memories, should I preserve them, were 'later truths I'....would...'make my own'?

And, Lord knows, I had learned 'neither late nor well' or I would not have arrived at this point with this loss about this love that did not die.

So I began writing down each memory regardless of whether it was in chronological agreement with.....anything. Those recollections, I decided, were something I did want to lose. Something I could not lose or I would be completely lost.

And I felt that I had lost enough already.

So, what follows are just that. Individual memories. Some isolated, some in order, some lengthy, some not. Yet they paint a part of the picture of that was MK and I know I will, in time, be glad I remembered.

Admittedly they are.....of an explicit nature.

But those memories were the most unique items I possessed. Unique as the woman who was responsible for them.

It has been my greatest regret that I never expressed to her that of all our minutes and hours and days spent together, clothed and unclothed, that the day we first met was my most valued memory of her.

It was the best day of my life.

I miss you, MK. God help me, I miss you so very much.