Releasing the fairy tale

I’m feeling sad – mourning the loss – of this fairy tale relationship I now know I will never have. I’m finally surrendering the vision I’ve held in my mind’s ever hopeful eye:

I yearn for his silence, for his quiet listening, for his gentle words of affirmation and joy. In every moment I give him my smile, offer him my laugh, chime words full of bells that celebrate my knowledge of who he is. And secretly I wait for his reciprocation, for his celebration of me, of the woman I am, of the grace of my being.

I try to show him by the way I love him. Try to show him how it is to yield, what it is to give, how I can leap through hoops with a smile on my face, and dance and dance and tap-tap dance.

As he talks over my carefully laid out words, as he tramples upon the shards of myself that I offer up for him to hold, as my heart sinks from the great holes torn deeply by his blind, glazed over eyes that see nothing but his expectations…I finally know in this deep purple place of understanding, that we will never have the happily-ever-after relationship I’ve worked so hard to create.

I finally realize this, on a shoved in gasp…as he complains about my driving and the floor I haven’t swept; as he competes against my accomplishments, finding a way to reach his hand that much higher than mine; as he stares blankly at me when I talk, only to interrupt me mid-sentence with his own, higher intellect.

It’s in these brushed off moments that have filled my lifetime with soggy birthday party confetti, that I finally know that my father will never love me in the way I want to be loved.

I have forever been looking skyward, watching this balloon filled with my own quiet expectations, burgeoning with all the energy I have spent to become his image of perfection. It is full of all the ways I have moved, and shifted, and edited, and morphed in the hopes that in me being different, he would be different too.

Gazing at this latex container of emotion for the last time, I cut its jagged ribbon that for too long has ripped into my wrist. I watch it slowly float away from me, its hazy brown hue bobbing along the current of the wind. I watch it with interest, awash in feelings of hope and freedom as I let it go.

Fireworks shower down around me as all the pieces of myself that I gave away in payment for his love, are returned back to me. My eyes adjust downward and I finally become earthbound, embracing the vast landscape that for too long was encased in a balloon-centered tunnel vision.

I stoop down to scoop up these pieces of myself.  And as I eat them whole they add fat and flesh to my love starved ribs.  Packing a bag of rations for this new adventure, I step off to explore an entirely new world I had actually always inhabited.  This fairytaleless land was here all along, it was simply waiting for my awakened gaze.