The Missing Middle

Dearest Beloved Phoenix on the Web,

It is your birthday today.  You are 13 years old.  I cannot totally believe you are not with me; it just doesn't make any sense at all, really.  I am doing a cleanse this week and began the process with a huge drop to the floor again when gunshots flooded through my window on Saturday afternoon.  They were incessant for several hours and they took me back again to the moment when I found your body, lifeless.  How can it be?  That morning I said goodbye to you, patted your head, said I love you, be a good boy, Mama goes and Mama always comes back...and then the next time you are lifeless, gunshot wound through your left side.  It's not that I don't understand cause and effect; it's something else, something else.  The degree of sudden separation; some of me cannot compute it.  And maybe there's something to not being there for the last breath, the holding, the soothing, whatever was needed...and of course for not being there to protect and prevent.  The missing middle of this.  Yes, the missing middle.

Oh, Phoenix, why else do I not let that night go?  Everything else of our lives together was not filled with that level of sorrow.  There's something about that night that I cannot let go of.  The trauma of separation.  The missing middle. 

I can understand something of not wanting to forget; I do not want to forget that level of evil in the world and what it does and can do.  How can I remember that and not let it lodge in me?  Tis the question I grapple with: how to hang on and let go at the same time?  I have been working with the Y as a symbol of that.  Right now I am at the bifurcation point.  It's not an intellectual solution to this; I don't need to just change my thinking as the New Age decrees.  No, this needs to unravel from within me.  And I need your help.  I do not want to continue to hold on to something that harms me.  I know there is no part of you and/or our relationship in that which harms me.

It seems that this cleanse is part of this process for me that is taking place both systemically and locally in my ovary and uterus.  I ask for your continued guidance, presence and help.  I need you. Happy Birthday, li'l boy.

I love you.
Me