I Hadn't Anyone Till You - [Susan Grieve - Daisy Kenyon]

Weak Pulse

From a young age I had to learn the hard way, that life isn’t easy, nor is it fair. Well… at least for me it never has been. Things just never seemed to go the way I wanted them to and still, now in my early thirties, this is still a reality for me. People can argue that with me being a fairly known poet, or the fact that I have achieved economic stability, I have nothing to complain about. Sure, from afar, those who view me and my life are perhaps quite rational to believe so, but to me, none of the money or fame meant anything, neither are all resolving to everything else. I’m always grateful that I’m able to live from what I love to do, and that there’s people who appreciate what I can offer to the world, my words and imagination. Yet I still feel so cold, albeit freezing on the inside. I register this frigidity with that of an abandoned dog that has lacked human touch, human love, for much too many years. I had craved, and still crave, affection that has been denied to me since the moment I was born, straight from the one person who should’ve provided me with an uncontained amount of affection, my mother. Without it I had felt and perhaps will always feel this overwhelming amount of… Nothingness. Many may not be aware, but something happens to an adult that wasn’t loved by their mother as a child and growing person, something… Ugly. This emptiness that lays unfulfilled transforms itself into this unsightly entity filled with an extreme lack of confidence, lack of self-love, and an all encompassing fear of abandonment. Growing up, the only light of hope in this dark world was my father who unceasingly acted as a lonely candle in an obscure room, with a tenuous luminescence attempting to brighten up the space as best as possible. When his glimmer went out, all my hope too left. I felt lost and I haven’t been the same since, I will never again be that Susan that felt genuine happiness with just a simple hug from her beloved father. While I can never get back what I once had or once was, only now, just recently, have I started to feel some essence of happiness after years of self work and constant effort to feel more like a normal adult who wasn’t burdened by constant deficiencies in their childhood. 

Daisy felt like that bright sun in the early morning, she was that light that made me feel warm again. She radiates happiness, kindness, tenderness, and most of all, love. I could never turn my back to her, no matter if I even wanted to. After all, it was winter again, and I needed my sun.

It isn’t a kind of love or adoration in which it means that I need her to live, but rather that because of her… I felt like a woman again. Putting it simply, I feel excitement in my stomach… I suppose the youngters would call them butterflies. Not only that, but I can feel my cheeks become coated in a pinkish color almost instantly under her soft gaze, I’m filled with the urge to hear another sweet compliment come out from her freckled lips, my heart beats incessantly before knocking on her door, I have an unequivocal need to see that smile come about on her face each and every time she sees me. I guess perhaps the development of our relationship and what has been brought out by this development mirrors what happens when one falls in love…. I suppose I’ve fallen in love with our relationship, right?

Once again, here I was sitting down in front of her like I’ve done several times before, letting her paint a portrait of me. I tried to be stealthy with my gaze, trying to look at her when she didn’t have her eyes on me. I studied her face as much as she did mine, and during the time when she was too focused and we didn’t say much I painted too… Well, in my mind that is. I painted images, delusions if I could say so… I pretended she felt the same way as I did, I imagined us on a spring afternoon, enjoying a picnic, just the two of us, sitting on the grass as we watched the sun going down. Daisy would rest her head on my lap as we talked about anything and everything; I would comb her wavy hair as her rosy lips looked inviting… I tried to think how that might feel. Those on me. Yet, that’s when the bubble would usually burst and reality would fall on top of me again.

It was ridiculous, it was adolescent-like and still I let those thoughts come to me. I didn’t resist them, because in a way… A significant one, I could be happy like that, loving her on the inside.