Joseph,
Though your heart is breaking and that was my doing–my heart is also breaking and that is yours.
I’ve been asking you to see me, hear me, know me… I thought it was my job, my compromise, my responsibility in our relationship not to be truly understood and I tried to accept it. And so now I see it. My heart. Clearly and brightly, it’s been breaking for years.
Joseph, my love, you have broken my heart.
We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it. -Rainer Maria Rilke
It’s easier now for me to let you go than it is to let go of something I believe and hold as a truth; indeed, it is something so powerfully a part of me that it would betray my personhood to lose it in the name of compromise.
To know, without fear, that maintaining my own wholeness and verity means I have to eschew the people who threaten it is both powerful and desolate.
So while I release you as the version of yourself whose staunch beliefs grew too large to leave room for my truths, I am hopeful in your rebirth, just as I have been in my own. I say none of this with pride in myself or my decision, rather, with the heavy hands and heart of one who is suffering the pain of loss. I submit my decisions and words to you humbly, for the truth is a humble thing.
I have loved you, I love you, I will love you.
The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust.
A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.
But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”
