Muchness and Light

What if this storms ends? And I don't see you, as you are now, ever again?

Four-and-a-half months ago, I found myself in a confusing place. I’d just realized the new guy I was head over heels for was dating someone else. I realized the ways in which I used sex to intimate love and exactly what my role was in re-traumatizing myself, constantly exacerbating my fear of emotional abandonment.

I made the decision not to date. Period. Maybe ever. And it was a very difficult thing for a girl who believes so deeply in love to eliminate the possibility of it at all, and to come to some kind of internal detente with that decision.

But then, I met someone. He was someone I’d known tangentially for more than a decade, though we’d never met in person. An unexpected conversation turned into another, and there is a moment (the event horizon, he said) where each of us realized the situation had turned in another direction.

Unexpectedly, and utterly terrified, I fell in love.

I’d spent years, off and on, begging the universe for some relief from my loneliness. Even when I was in relationship, it was always with badly-damaged men who refused to try to be better. Either I’d tire of their inconsistency, or they’d tire of my trying to get them to see how much better their life (and my life with them) would be, if they would just show up. Show up physically sometimes, but mostly I needed them to show up emotionally. Consistently. Reliably.

There were many, many nights on my own, when I would be in tears, prostrate before a god I barely believe in, praying for peace. Yes, I would prefer to be with a partner, because I believe so completely in the beauty and truth of love. But I eventually resigned myself to wanting at least peace in my solo heart, to accept the rest of my life in singledom. I paraded every hurt, in lurid detail, through my mind and steeled myself to not being vulnerable to them again.

But then, he appeared. Bumblebee. Kind, generous, smart, funny. Damaged but speaking to me through song. We meshed so well. He knew all of my shit, all of my fears, understood my ongoing process of trying to rewire myself from the inside out. No one, with the exception of the girls, had every accepted me so fully and completely. So incredibly lovingly.

Of course there was a catch: he was 180 miles away.

I’d just sworn up and down two weeks prior that I could never do a long-distance relationship. My need for physical proximity and regular contact was too great. But he was worth the chance. Initially, we were making it work pretty well. We would visit each other in our respective cities, and we were happy just to be together.

Eventually the logistics—four kids, visitation schedules, family obligations—started to erode our time together. Unavoidable demands on him were preventing us from having consistent connection, and it seemed to only be worsening. I was more anxious about this relationship than I’d been in years. The anxiety could be abated by reliable contact, but his logistics wouldn’t allow for it.

Faced with living indefinitely in a perpetually-anxious state, knowing the damage my response to the insecurity and anxiety could cause, I made the decision to end the relationship.

Nothing about it feels good. Choosing the rock over the hard place simply gives me a perch from which to see a vast, lonely ocean, a place from which to sing my lamentations. It feels like yet another trick of Fate, dangling the gilded promise of happiness, only to snatch it away again, laughing in her delight.

I don’t expect to do this again. There is no more surface of me to scar or fracture without breaking me open irreparably. My fear of emotional abandonment is consistently reinforced, and I have a direct role in choosing the relationships that undergird my insecurities. I do not trust myself to choose wisely.

It was so nice to be loved for a while again. It was nice to be missed when we were apart. It was wonderful to see my worth reflected in someone else’s eyes, far beyond the value of sex. It was wonderful to able to love someone, actively and deliberately, and to have my efforts appreciated.

But I am back in the confusion. I no longer believe it was an inherent flaw in me that made me unworthy of loving care and attention. I do believe I was a young victim of other people’s failings, and that set the course for how I would see every relationship and exchange and emotion in the years to come. Other people’s actions set in motion consequences that played out in me. I, in turn, made my own decisions with their own consequences, and somehow I seem to be so bogged down that progress forward is tiring and difficult and sometimes illusory.

Today, I don’t believe that I will ever really find what I know exists. It is there to be found, but I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to touch what is perpetually under a veil of tears.

I will stop crying, eventually. I will move through my well-honed List of Shit to Do after a Breakup. I will eventually feel like I can breathe again, and I will be happy again, though I’m not sure that my definition of that will ever be what it once was.

But I hope Bumblebee is able to find the balance he needs. I hope he’s able to establish who he is, within and without other people’s constraints. He is a wonderful man, and I love him very much. I want good things for him.

And I want good things for me.

 

 

And I built a ship for two, it waits for me and you in the dew of the fields.

For me, love is the spark at the center of the universe, the absolute essence of truth and good. It’s the moment of origin at the Big Bang. It’s the snap of God’s fingers to create it all.

There is nothing more valuable to me, whether it’s romantic or platonic or familial. True love that cares and is concerned and active, not mimicry that makes someone seem a more palatable version of human.

Maybe it wouldn’t mean so much, and maybe I wouldn’t love so hard, had I not been hurt in the ways I was. For all of my exploration and self-evisceration, there is no way to know for sure. I don’t get a George Bailey Christmas, when I get to see how my life could have been different. I get the life I create from the rubble, sometimes balanced precariously across a glittery web of scars, littered with lost hopes and dreams.  

But through all of the discord, through all of the incessant buzzing inside me, there is a constant pulse, like a faint homing beacon at the center, echoing in my core, through the emptiest and most desolate parts of me. In me but outside me, like a marker for my path through and out to something bigger than me.

My path to God, to arcane truth and to wholeness.

Love.

If I’m quiet enough and still enough, I can find my way. There is a path. Maybe not for everyone, but it’s the only way I have left to go. Every other direction has been explored, defiantly and exhaustively.

My pasts are tangled like obstacles, certainly, and therapy has been vital in helping me to make sense of it all. To make sense of myself. And it is a process, occurring in the time in space in which I live. Even when I’m not in session, the work is still happening, consciously and un. A slice here and there of a valiant sword, and I can take another few steps. But sometimes it feels like those thorny vines close back up, fueled by their own blood and sometimes mine.

I’m fucking tired from the battle.

Sometimes I want to curl up and sleep, to let it all block out the sun. But every time I have relegated myself to dim solitude, I have been overcome with a greater fear of what hides in the dark, of the darkness itself. And I have taken one more swipe, in the desperate hope of finding someone, anyone, hidden in bramble, who will hold back the tangles for me to step ahead again. A simple man, tattered and bruised, but smiling and willing, offering me a hand to hold to steady me. His boots coated in stardust.

I don’t need him to slay my dragons. If there’s an evil enchantress in all of this, it’s me, desperately trying to protect my own heart.

But, God, that’s too much to ask of anyone. No mere mortal can be expected to love me like that.  And I don’t know that anyone could be ready or able, no matter how much he might want to be. I don’t know if I am ready to believe that someone else even could.

I am not selfish in my intent. I am willing to fight for him in the same ways, to cheer him on and to appreciate his efforts. He deserves someone who will wipe his brow and kiss his face gently and tell him that he’s on his own right path. He deserves someone who will protect him while he sleeps.

I want to be able to grasp his hand, to draw on his strength when I am lacking. I want to be able to call out in the dark and hear his voice as more than a distant echo that might just be my own.

I need the reassurance that comes from knowing someone who loves me is truly and completely there.

Consistency. Reliability.

I have stumbled upon men before, of course, as surprised to find them as they were to find me. But, in the end, they’ve all been nothing more than fever dreams, absurdities fleeting in the light and forgotten in detail if not in feeling. Distant echoes like a memory of thunder.

In my hurt, I have retreated, time and again, afraid of the fear that piles like more rubble, threatening to blot out the sun entirely in self-preservation.

Pandy says love isn’t worth having if we aren’t willing to risk self-annihilation. But I don’t think that destruction of myself is a measure of love. It’s a measure of fear, of protection from the pain of the burning sun on my skin after so many years of darkness. For me, it’s a way to maintain the darkness and comfort from the unknown. It is mimicry of martyrdom.

I want to live in the light. I want to be free of the tangles and the thorns. I want to let the sun burn them all away so that there is no more fight. To stop watering them with my own blood and tears.

I need open space and fresh air. I need the last battle through the brush to be freeing.

And I want to find the source of the pinging, in rhythm with my heart. I want to find the beacon that leads me home.

Because I believe that I will also find a simple man with dusty boots that shimmer. I believe that there will be an arcane, perfect smile and outstretched hands that glisten with dew.

And so I fight. Every day. Sometimes the battle is just to get out of bed and soothe my own fears. The hardest battles are fought in the middle of the night, awake and alone in the dark, knowing that what I want and need most is somewhere out there in a vast universe that is no larger than the breadth and depth of my heart.

The way out is through. I couldn’t go back, if I tried. So I keep moving forward, step after exhausted step, because I believe there is love to be found.

I believe there is love to be found for me.