Lactose intolerance

Dear Complaint Department,

My damned stomach doesn’t like cheese. This makes me sad.

Dear Intolerance,

We all love what wants to kill us in some way. What a wild trick of life. We all are drawn like a moth to the proverbial flame of what will first cause us blazing pain and then what will take our last breath. It’s the dance of remembering we are alive. Have you ever had times in life where you felt numb and distant and not very real? I have. And in these seasons we begin to pray for pain. We begin to ask for anything that will prick the armor that keeps us safe but dissociated within a dull and drab world.

Be it cheese, be it love, be it that dream, or those paths—what we can’t have haunts us daily. People say to be present, but how can we, haunted as we are? What you want but can’t have takes on a monstrous presence and waits outside every window and knocks at every hidden door you’ve stashed it behind. Welcome to longing. Welcome to living. Welcome to pain.

I too love quite a few things that only bring me harm. I have no idea how to quit. I have no idea how to forgo the longing. I have no idea how to stop courting what only wants to destroy all the good things of spring I come with around the corner of winter.

You can’t choose between love and living and pain. It’s the same bouquet.

You just have to love yourself enough to survive all of it.

So perhaps a bit less cheese and a bit less not letting all the monsters in. Or perhaps it is letting all the monsters in and giving them dinner and listening to their complaints. Then send them on their way.

—with love for your own love for what causes you pain,

with love and grace for all the things you want, but can’t have,

The Complaint Department