IAN GALLOWAY

I lost a lot last year. Not everything, but enough. I am not unfamiliar with loss, but I believe after 2023, and the wake of the pandemic that stole the years before it, I had finally reached a profound weariness with losing. I lost friends, lost family, my job, my savings, and so, so much time. I lost almost everything–or just enough. Coming out of my own Hades, like Orpheus, I dare to look back because…I must.

At that time, when all of those things disappeared from my life, it seemed senseless and devoid of reason. I thought I had done everything I was supposed to do. For the first time in my life I held in my hand a ticket to a future where I wouldn’t have to just survive. Almost as swiftly as I had grasped it, a storm wind swept it all away into an indifferent sky. One call, and my entire livelihood was taken from me. Before such things would have gutted me and left me bleeding out; but how many storms had I weathered before, and how many times had I seared the wound shut and got right back up? Those battles in my life made me a self-taught surgeon. I can suture myself back together, and this past year I had nothing but thread and time. 

It rained a lot last winter. Do you remember the sky, those magnificent heavenly clouds, or how green the hills turned? There was so much time I spent on the road then, the scenery was a dream I gave to myself. Highway has always been good medicine, and I took all the roads I wanted in an effort to reclaim some semblance of agency. I understand the inherent aversion to being alone, but wrapped within the gift of all those miles, was myself, with nowhere and no one to escape to but myself. I felt like a kid again, perhaps because so many things had been taken so quickly from me and not replaced. Maybe because I felt small and powerless, with so much outside of my control. It rained on the road, and on the hills, and in my home, and I just wept. At times, they were all the tears as a boy I was told not to shed. As a man, I allowed that boy to finally just…cry. My pride, which was just the shadow cast by my shame, left me unable to bring that pain to anyone else. I suffered silently, like a good and stupid man.

My heart just broke. All those cracks that had formed over the years in the different corners of myself had spread along the chambers, like so many streaks of lightning. Until their patient and steady course weaved together in my chest and struck true. Holding my needle and thread, gazing at the Lichtenberg figure scorched across my heart, I didn’t know how to heal this wound. Only realizing then how terribly far I’d gone to keep it from ever breaking again. Behold me now, burned and utterly broken open.

I haven’t wept that much since I was a child. I suppose the more honest thing to say would be; I never really allowed myself the opportunity to mourn. How those arrears of grief accumulate when you don’t know how to allow yourself to feel it. Their dues arrive inevitably, almost always when all defenses are laid bankrupt and bare. Sometimes there is a lesson in loss. Truly I believe now that the collected loss was a chain, and these were all lessons I was not learning; and I would be whipped by that chain until I learned the lesson. Would that I could tell you that this was true of every defeat, but sometimes you can think you’ve done all the right things–and you still lose. Perhaps I needed to learn that too. My most obstinate course in dire need of correction, needing to be taught in a language I would understand. From a young age, I understood violence fluently.

Stripped of my station, rejected again and again in every possible shape rejection can be fashioned in, I think I finally found humility when my face was smashed into the dirt by the irons of consequence. I had never really considered myself a prideful person, until I saw the great lie that hid behind my dirty face. That innate desire of never wanting to be seen as weak by anyone for shame of my own perceived weakness. While being seen and acknowledged for my strength by people close to me has meant the world; this burden suddenly felt too heavy to carry alone.

Like most children who went the way of being born to burning houses, it is a tremendous task for me to ask for help. We tend to just sit in the fire. I had learned the hard way what happened when I did not reach out to my people the last time I had passed this way, through this great valley of defeat. I also learned that not every home I make has to burn just because I live in it; we just get so used to the fire, don’t we? As I said before, I am no stranger to loss. In 2016, I lost my sanity from years of breathing in all that smoke and ash. Perhaps the only sane thing I have found since then, has been the understanding that if you try and make yourself stone so as to never again wear singed skin, then life will find a way to shatter you completely. We are not meant to be these great, unfeeling machines numbing our pain by any means necessary. Once again, I was a stupid, stupid man.

Even possessing an innate understanding of this hard won lesson, it was still a colossal undertaking for me to show up in my perceived brokenness to my community this time around. In all my vanity, a part of me felt I had an image to uphold to these people that had come to rely on me. Thankfully, I was not the same man who had crossed this valley before, and I buried that part of me there, knowing it was nothing but shame that truly kept me from allowing those same people to show up for me the way I had shown up for them. Understanding, far better than most, that the foundational feeling that lies with the discomfort in asking for help is the fear of rejection. Fear built on the objective truth that, at a point in time, no one was there for us when we needed them to be. I became a compulsive savior, because no one came to save me. But that was then. Expecting a hand to reach back now is nothing other than pure faith, and it is an easy thing to lose faith in this world and the people in it when we did not have a hand to hold; but there are those in this life worthy of believing in. After so many years, with all that stone around my heart now broken away by the storm, I finally learned on the other side of that fear is love. 

In spite of myself, I reached out and so many hands reached back. Had I only done so sooner, yet I try not to dwell in regret, for I would not be who I am without such lessons. My friends and family, the community I had finally learned to foster and nurture, loved me the way I needed to be loved. They went through the valley with me, and said a prayer for the man I was buried there. They listened without judgment, and never once invalidated my own experience or demanded anything for any of it. Had I kept all of that to myself, sat in the fire alone as I have always done, I believe I would have robbed them of the opportunity to show me that I do not need to be perfect to receive affection; another of life’s great illusions I accepted as a truth. When I had nothing, they still gave me what they could. At a moment when I was destitute, how profoundly wealthy I found I still was. That perspective, along with the steadfast hope that everything was going to be okay, made all the difference.

Of my life, there are stories too sad to tell, but allow me to tell you one thing that stands brilliantly illuminated above all of that suffering; the enduring belief that the love we give always comes back. Perhaps at the time, materializing in a manner in which we do not recognize. We fear that which we do not know, and I am afraid I have run from love many times in my life when I did not know what it was. The heartbreak I unintentionally caused others, to spare myself that same feeling, has filled me with such shame that at times I wonder if I hold onto that shamefulness in an effort to continue to punish myself. For so long I fed on the lie that the love I desired in life did not exist in an effort to soothe the ache of disappointment that dwelt in my romantic heart. Sustaining my malnourished soul on a convenient diet of disbelief, until the day I accepted that that love must exist, because here I exist. The only thing that was keeping me from feeling that love was myself.

So many of us are unknowingly indoctrinated into the belief that affection is a currency always to be given or withheld in exchange. Had I not learned as a child that love was only to be attained when I was without flaw, then perhaps I would not be so flawed, and would find my perceived past transgressions so much easier to forgive. I am a man shaped and manufactured by all of his mistakes. I am learning, and unlearning, and have done my best to make the cost of those lessons mean something.

Perhaps Orpheus looks back, because behind him is what he loves. But I am done looking behind me and defining myself by how well I carry the past. The loss that I see now as anything but senseless, I am now so grateful for. For all their impacts broke me open just enough to let the light back in. The price given in exchange was a new sight to see so much of the life I had dreamed was not meant for me, and what was meant for me will return when I learn to forgive myself enough to dream again.  My eyes fix on the horizon in front of me, and my heart is open enough now to ask God for the forgiveness I still struggle to give myself. For I am humble enough now to ask for the help I need, and this is one burden in my life I no longer wish to hold on to.

For too long have I believed there was nothing worthy of believing in other than myself. Here I was, a God who couldn’t even answer his own prayers. All of these things I have done, I had to do alone, and for what? For whom? What was I trying to prove all this time; that I never needed anyone? I have only ever needed people, and have only brought profound suffering on myself thinking life could be lived any other possible way. For a very long time, I have been unable to forgive myself for what I have done to me. Then I saw all that pain was authored by an angry child, cursing the world for being so unfair. I acknowledge that poor boy and his anger, whose fires saw me through so many winters I would not have survived without. I take his tiny hands and unfurl them from all the things he foolishly thought he could control, and together we let go. 

– Ian

Winters are always hard.

The brevity of day saps me like a blown out candle, and I forgot to make my wish. Is it because I was born a little lion under the sun? Is it too late to borrow a little flame? I can’t remember when it got so cold; only that one day beneath the bleakest black of February, I could not get warm. I was once a boy whose heart and bones had never felt a chill. Who loved this part of the year, where you could make shadows dance from the rainbow of a neon Christmas.

“What happened to that boy?” my mother asks–as she pretends she does not know.

You all dressed him in white, and I think I lost him somewhere along the way in the falling snow. I am trying to find him again, somewhere hiding in the dark on the longest night of my life with no wishes left and no flint to light.

As with most days, morning shook him from his sleep with hands of hurt and worry. He woke suddenly, jostled by the throbbing ache in his right shoulder. His dreams, still fresh on his eyes, were shapeless and without words; half remembered by the sensation of a presence that had been painting the walls of his subconscious with feverish colors that disquieted him from the comfort of his drab solitude. The paint was still wet, and clung to his feet as he walked into waking. In the futility of trying not to think of the painter, he thought of the painter.

His shoulder creaked as he stretched out the contorted, blood starved limb. The aches informed him that his sleep had been unwavering in its restlessness. He tried to focus on the discomfort’s instruction, to distract his mind from these such persistent pursuers, until both ache and dream grew dull and defeated at his somnolent stubbornness. He would often wake with a start from his limbs jolting out from under him; as if reaching out quickly for something that wasn’t there that should have been. Lingering vestiges, perhaps, of a past life–or something that had spilled over from another world entirely.

As his heavy eyes adjusted to the light lazily spilling into the bedroom, he noticed the rain had finally quelled, but a lazy gloom still lingered over his quiet town. The still glistening streets made him hopeful that they had not seen the last of this winter’s storms. This unusually wet December had brought with its nourishing showers, new aches that had begun to bite at him with such strength in their jaws, that he could not simply will them away. As he studied their petulant teeth, his well-oiled apathy when dealing with such matters he forced himself to believe were inconsequential, shifted suddenly from feigned indifference to intrusive worry. Worries he had not carried before, that arrived suddenly among the new burdens that, as a man, he had only just adjusted to by lifting them willingly and ignoring that ever waning voice of angst. You carry it all on your shoulders, he thought, and continued to massage the tightness out of his muscles.

Vigilant as he was to surveying the constant condition of his body, he had begun to notice his right hand had begun to swell along the metacarpal bone from a boxer’s break that he’d earned during a time where angst waxed full in him like a blood moon. When rage was still his master and he, a naive apprentice who like most boys was taught anger was his only acceptable means of emotional expression. Like a painter told to paint the sky, and only given the color red. The fifth bone in his hand had never healed correctly; the small crater in his knuckle served as a monument to the consequences of the brash, foolish, and often unnecessary violence of men–or rather, boys playing at being men. The calcification of the broken bone had made the fist stronger, yet because the break was not correctly set, as the cartilage healed over time the blunt trauma resulted in a malformation of his hand. It cramped to the verge of temporary paralysis when he wrote for too long, and when it rained, he felt a swelling ache, as if his hand were suddenly made of wood gone damp. For the wound to heal correctly, he would need to break the bone again, but why go back to what authored the pain in the first place when he had already grown so used to how it ached?

He remembered reading once that the body responds in all manner of ways to changes in air pressure that occur before the advent of a storm, and some of these responses can be the swelling of soft tissue and fluids expanding around bodily injuries. He was no stranger to the sensitivity humans experience surrounding storms; understanding, from an anthropological perspective, that our senses evolved to seek out the rain in pursuit of fertile pastures. His father would often sniff the air like a bloodhound and be able to predict if it would rain; even when the weather seemed to call for clear skies. Human olfactory senses are more sensitive to the perfumed microbes of rain than sharks are of blood in the water; and his own nose was now just as keen. He swore he could feel, among the aches and the scents, that on those wet, winter days, how the green of the world seemed to open up around him to receive the rain, like parted and expecting lips waiting on the dare of a first kiss. Where others cursed those rainy days, even as a child he would delight. Chasing even storms for the hope of catching a glimpse of lightning and feeling thunder break above him, echoing in his rib cage like waves against a cliff. Rain was as familiar as a mother’s lullaby, a song sung by bloodline, an ode to the perpetually rain kissed highlands of his forebears. Painted eternally green and long since unbesmirched by the foot fall of men. When it rained he was home.  

The patio was still wet from the storm the night before. The skies were clearing but his hand still ached. He found himself staring at his fingers, studying the road map of vascular highways that ran down to the coast of his knuckles that he tensed and released, testing their strength as if suddenly it would be sapped from him at any moment. Turning his hands over, he gazed at the lines of his palms, and the calloused clouds that lingered over them from years of blistered labor that had purchased his strength. He thought of palm readers and words like, ‘heart lines’ and ‘chakra’. The ancient cartography of reading hands, and the weight of its credibility among a cold, modernizing and quite mechanical world that seemed dead set on removing the heart from any and all conversation.

As he continued to study his fingers, a slow marching fear set sight on him and he fell in rank; what if he lost the strength of his hands completely? Would he soon be unable to pluck the strings of a guitar, play the keys of a piano, take a pen to paper on matters of the heart, or take the hands of a lover and intertwine them in his fingers? He sat with that fear for a moment, as he had learned that “the only way out is through”. Wondering where the foundation of that feeling came from, he invited the discomfort to have its due discourse, and after slowly digesting in its belly, he found himself full of tremendous gratitude that he possessed the ability to do these things with his hands at all. With hesitant but earnest ego he saw his hands were the hands of an artist…so much like the hands of his grandmother.

As he pondered on painters, palms, and pain, his abrupt thought of his grandmother as he sat with this fear–was by fear’s own design. There, at the root of his worry, was the recollection that his grandmother was an artist who had lost the use of her hands after being stricken with arthritis. She was already great in her years when he was born, so he’d only known her for a short while as a child; but what an impression she left after only so little time. He still vividly remembered her kindness, her smell, her gifts of lemon drops and her love of reading. How her frail hands, decorated with their hard earned decades, shook and gnarled into themselves, so stricken as they were with arthritic tremors. He recalled sitting on her blanketed lap as a young boy, holding him at her side, how she turned the pages of his books not with the pinch of fingers, but with her entire clasped hand, slowly, shakily, but steadfast still with the stoicism of a woman who stood apart.

Being so young, he was not yet taught to see someone challenged so physically as a cripple; he only knew, in that way only a child could know, that that was simply her way. Now, as a man, vividly sitting at the hearth of those warmest of memories, he imagined the tremendous effort it must have taken her as she battled her disease to do something as simple as turning a page in her grandchild’s picture book. How often she read to him on that rocking chair by the window, so constricted as she was by her condition, but still, holding him tighter then the disease held her. As the long forgotten memories fell onto him like the rain that pattered on the roof, he began to truly grasp, perhaps for the first time, the enormous and unyielding depth of a woman’s heart, and wept as he fell in.  

Forgetting the way she showed her love all this time felt like a sin, but he forgave himself–for she came back to him when he needed her. His grandmother, along with being an outstanding woman of character, was also an artist of extraordinary talent. Her prowess unknown to the world, hidden away in domestic servitude like so many women of her time. These great writers, painters, and poets–entire voices of a generation whose art lies lost to time in an attic somewhere gathering dust instead of adoration. And the singers–oh, he imagined all the singers whose beautiful songs were only heard by their children and their dirty dinner plates. How many homes held a concert in its halls played for an audience of none? His grandmother’s paintings belonged in galleries and museums, her piano and harp should have been recorded and transmuted on vinyl; something to last–not for the sake of worldly acclaim, but for legacy that is passed down in family. But it was lost, all of it, except a few dusty treasures, when he lost her. Forever hidden in the same way, he confessed, he had been hiding himself. 

What inhabited him now wasn’t worry, or the pitiful distraction from his dreams or waking life; all at once it was love, and the absence of where to put that enduring love that we call grief. The deepest, and truest ache, that made the pain in his bones feel so utterly inconsequential, of only wanting more time. He stayed with it, letting the lesson pour into him, for he was as open now as the flowers in his garden receiving the rain. Knowing fully then there was only so much time to make, and hold the things he made with these hands. So much time had already been lost, held in the familiar fingers of his fear. But if his grandmother could still hold him with hands riddled with disease, then he had no right, no excuse, not to hold onto the things he did not want to lose.

He decided he would make something today. Anything would be enough. As he set about his work, he remembered something his father had told him about his grandmother once, “I always saw my mother when I looked at you…you have her spirit.” He held onto his father’s words, and his grandmother’s memory, and suddenly remembered his hand as he realized, it doesn’t hurt anymore. The weight in his shoulders felt so, so much lighter. He breathed, and though his face was damp, he didn’t smell any rain.

– IG

How many doors did I dare knock on in the dark, when I had no home in myself? How many eyes did I see peering at me through the glass, turning their locks when they saw the starved look in my own? It was a beggar and a stranger that sought shelter in you. You were right to give me the gift of your silence. And yet, still I stayed in that familiar place. For when you were silent, that quiet felt like the cold walls of my father’s house; it wore the face of my mother’s abandonment.

I’ve chased at the heels of love since I could walk. Reaching out with small hands that yearned only for a glance that never turned back. Some nights, I still look for those eyes.

To the siege I lay at love’s door, waiting for a surrender that would never come–I relent. It was a foolish boy who thought it took a war to be worthy. I forgive myself, for fighting for a birthright refused. Can you forgive the hole in my chest, and the desperate things I did to fill it?

I took the long way home, to find myself in that space that knew no sound. My weapons are all buried now, and rust in the dirt. May the mud stain my nails forever to remind me the only heart I should have been fighting for was mine.

– IG

There are boys I grew up with
that I will never grow old with.
Who took all of their tomorrows away
because they saw no way out of yesterday.
I found my peace with their choice to leave,
through tombstone testimonies
of my own survived suicides,
and eulogies that sang praises
we never said
when they still had ears to hear.

I know the battles they fought
behind the veil of their smiling eyes,
for every man I have ever met
was a soldier fighting a father’s war.
A son taught how not to feel,
whose tongue twists,
unable to speak
the language of his own heart
until it becomes metal
and as mute as our early graves.
A brother who thinks vulnerability a weakness
at the cost of something as valueless as pride.

Flowers only lay atop our resting place
as death follows the fatal burden
of man’s deaf desperation.
Live for those boys claimed by their war
who don’t get to see today.
Bring them your flowers on their battlefields.

How I wish I could have been there in those trenches
with you during your blackest night,
when dawn seemed such an impossible distance.
With tears mercifully masked by the morning dew,
I will think of you at sunrise.

– I G

I’ve been thinking a lot about death recently, or perhaps, it is death that has been thinking of me. Did I ever tell you I can see ghosts? It’s true; I see ‘em all the time. When you’ve known death and its many faces, you know that the duty of the dead is they remind us to live. So, I suppose, what I really should be saying is; recently I have been thinking a lot about life. 

There are many ghosts to be found in the Fall as death litters the ground with it’s decayed trinkets. The advent of autumn looms as the last leaves atop my family tree have begun to wither away like the last lick of embers in an arid hearth. All the men who have raised me are either dead or dying, and I steel myself for what will be a weary winter chasing the spirits of my fathers into that long night I cannot follow.

I am trying to find the beauty in the changing of leaves, but it’s all I can do to seek some semblance of warmth amidst the coldest season of my life. There is a vision painted in the mist of their dwindling breath, to live the life they couldn’t. To do what I must to survive until spring’s sun thaws the ice that has long made a home in my heart. For now, I dream about life, and I think about death, and I see ghosts in the shivering trees. There will always be a longing to see green leaves back on those branches so barren; now I know this is called grief. 

– I G