too much

Again a restless night. Again a frightening dawn. Again a feeling of certainty. Again the combination with old despair and newly born sadness.

I dreamt about you last night. Place and time were blurry but somehow we managed to find each other's eyes again. We managed to acknowledge something was not going well between us. We managed to talk about it or at least to begin talking about it.

I woke up. You were gone. I was left with the sense that maybe the trouble was not that my heart was not enough. Now it seems to me that I might have been, that I still am too much. Too much intensity, too much neediness, too much love.

Too much was my mother's feeling when we played the baby swallow game. I would have stayed forever cuddled in her arms; she could hardly wait for the cuddling to be over. I felt like begging; I didn't dare to. Triggering rejection was far too risky.

She's been dead for seven years now. I'm not. You're not. But I feel as helpless to reach out, to be reached out to, as if we were.

Too much, too much, too much, my mother's voice hammers inside my head.
A migraine pill at 5 am. A glass of wine at half past 3.

Maybe it's just a matter of mourning and letting go...