The following entry was written by Jeneane Sessum of Allied.

Unknowing

And all the while, there is loss in love.

The rain comes down, uneven cadence, down, and I sink in to memories, at six, knowing love by its starched dress shirt and sandpaper cheeks. Love is the rain coming down, a flood of remembering.

How much pain there is in love.

I push it away, leave it, forget it, outrun it. And what is there to be afraid of? Only Everything.

The fear of loss builds walls between hearts. So it is: before I can love you, I must truly lose you.

Lose you completely, become paralyzed by “without.”

I am telling you my secret. Do you love me enough to keep it?

Helene Cixous says:

"There is a point where the unknown begins. The secret other, the other secret, the other itself. The other that the other does not know. What is beautiful in the relation to the other, that moves us, what overwhelms us the most -- that is love -- is when we glimpse a part of what is secret to him or her, what is hidden, that the other does not see; as if there were a window by which we see a certain heart beating. And this secret that we take by surprise, we do not speak of it; we keep it. That is to say, we keep it: we do not touch it. We know, for example, where the other's vulnerable heart is situated; and we do not touch it; we leave it intact. This is love."

I am telling you this: I have lived my life at the crossing of fear and loss, stepped down into the absence of what sustained me, unwrapped its embrace. The intensity of what “is not” is unrelenting.

When you come to me in my undoing, it is that much sweeter.

Remembering but real.

Lover, daughter, mother, self.

Come back to me, she said.

Come back to me, she said because I have brought loss back to her remembering. There is no way for her to numb it; she tries. Can we reconcile, she said. I am all she has left to lose, even though she has much more.

She can never know how much I love her in the despair of my losing her -- she has never “not known.”

I am learning.

Cixous says:

“It is the biggest; it is far off. At the end of the path of attention, of reception, which is not interrupted but which continues into what little by little becomes the opposite of comprehension. Loving not knowing. Loving: not knowing.”

I lose; I get lost. It is all in love.

And I will keep your secret.