I Still Miss You

I was at an art opening a couple of months ago and was stopped in my tracks by a painting. Lately it’s become very trendy to include text in artwork. Does it come from a fear of not being heard through the art medium alone? Is it a need to be heard LOUD AND CLEAR? I don’t know, but I tend to like it, and to be drawn to it. Maybe because the endless supply of sad goings on in our world sometimes make me want to scream out loud?

In any case, the painting in question held me captive for a long time as I stared at the words: I still miss you. The words conveyed emotion, longing, and a fleeting sense of despair. As I stood there, staring, I experienced the long-ago drama of youthful love lost; the misery of a heavy heart full of ache, of possibilities fading like a vision glimpsed through a mist of tears. The sadness in the words did not inspire me to buy the piece, but I found it hard to walk away. Wanting somehow to take the feeling with me, I pulled out the notepad I always keep in my purse, and jotted them down. I still miss you.

Since then, every now and again, those four words, and the attendant energy that comes with them, rise up like some unfinished sentence awaiting punctuation; a mysterious melancholy that must live inside me, hoping for resolution. Strange thing, the subconscious. I can’t think of anything in my waking consciousness to make sense of those feelings—no missed opportunities, lost dreams, or past lovers that haunt me.

But, in searching for an answer to my inexplicable reaction, I’ve come up with a few things that might engender the feeling behind the words, I still miss you:

• Haiti, the country of my birth.
Although I have no conscious desire to live there, when I am on my native soil, it feels like home.

• The children I might have had.
Since I never felt the desire to bear children, and have never regretted foregoing motherhood, maybe the voice I’m hearing comes from the one(s) that might have been.

• My first dog, Josephine; my first cat, Jelly Bean.
I still miss them.

• The friends that disappear as we mature, grow, and change into different people with different vibrations.

• The books I read that touched my heart; those stories whose details have faded from my memory.

I think I know how to fix this unnamed thing that keeps nagging at me. I’m going to buy myself a copy of Catcher in the Rye! I can’t wait.