Going Down With The Ship

I haven't written because it has been nothing but pain all the way 'round. I try to take my moments and turn them just a degree toward happiness, but I am nowhere near it. I have woken up in the middle of the night full of poetry for it, but I force myself back to sleep instead. I want to sleep my way through this pain even though I know I have to feel every moment of it in order to move forward in my life. There is a drive to write that feels as if it's driving me, that my hands are the vehicle and it's not my decision what comes out. I am in love, and always will be. What I want most in this world eludes me. I don't know how this came to be, that I am a person for whom life spreads out beautifully, with such grace and gratitude it has come to me; and yet fruition of the deepest, heaviest desire I have rows away with the lifeboat, one hand reaching toward it, the other caught in the riptide, accepting the pull.