At what point did my love for you end and my need for you to validate my fantasy about myself, about life, about love itself pick up, posing “love” surreal, impossible?
At what point did my desire for you end and my need to be craved, to be proven to again and again that I was desirable, that I could control you and could control just how much you reached me, truly reached me, begin?
At what point did my fantasies distort who you are in my eyes and at what point did those fantasies alienate you from me, me from you and even you from yourself?
At what point did my hopes blind me, then bind me to a hopeless mirage in the desert of a reality nonexistent while you stood there simply being a feast as I starved needlessly?
(How many of us ever get to really see each other, feel and know each other beyond the bullshit we are so convinced is real?)
At what point do any of us know beyond our projections dawning on the pretend horizon of our insecure need to be exceptional, to be anything but as human as the rest of us?
Do we reach the end, the bottom of the trunk so full of all those masks we believe we are and we hope won’t fall off, showing our unwashed beauty?
At what point will I walk permanently naked into the moment and not reach for the nearest defense mechanism to shield me from what it means to be free from the ancient pride hide?
Take me there, to that point.
I weary here of the shields and notions of perfection and the quiet desperation made by so much noisy needing to make a meaning that already thrives and will live beyond my dying…
J. Ruth Kelly 
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