You are a good person. And I am in awe of this immediately. It makes me nervous. How kind you are, and how honest. How pure-of-heart, as they say.
There was no white horse, no dazzling suit of armor, just your soft voice and quiet footsteps. Your kind eyes and slow, deliberate smile. I spent those first few months just watching you, wondering what to make of you. Suspended in a thick, buoyant tangle of my own bewilderment.
It felt important to go. Because to want the intimacy of a relationship is to accept the intimacy of breaking up.
...
It ends with your warm beer on the table between us--only half drunk, you having chosen your words carefully. We just weren’t a match, I say, trying to make it okay for you. Trying to make what feels slippery in our mouths, less so. You seem more terrified than I feel, and I really want to make this okay for you. We sit in silence for the length of a few beats before I suggest we leave. You don’t like your beer, no use in forcing you to drink it. We push back our chairs, barely looking one at the other, hugging uncomfortably. I walk west, you east.
I am not angry. Hurt yes, but not angry. I do not fault you. We love who we love.
Or not.
What’s hard is that we cannot sit there for a moment longer. The promise of friendship as a thing belonging only to a future in which time has passed.
This hanging ellipses. This moment between discovery and something else. This passing of the time as strangers.
Days later over different beers you will use my words as a way of explanation. You will say “we just weren’t a match” and someone will relay this to me. But those weren’t your words, they were mine. And my heart will break, just a little, because that wasn’t my experience. Or, well, it was, at the very least, more complicated than that. And those were my words for you.
Perhaps there is more I should have said, sitting at that small table, warm, bad pub drinks between us. About doubt and how it is a thing that multiplies in the absence of a warm hand or the sound of a person’s laugh or the lines that ring our eyes. How it grows in silence and alone, under the unrelenting glare of others’ comments. How it is a nasty trick of fear.
And we were both so busy.
But it is not my job to convince a man to love me. It cannot be my job to convince a man to love me.
I was not in love with you. It’s really not like I was in love with you. It’s just that, every time you met me at my door I’d think, This is a man I like walking towards.
And that was not nothing.
image by Jessica Rose
"She is a year ago.
She is the ache in the empty,
the first time you changed your mind
and the last time you were sorry about it.
She is a city sleeping beside you,
warm and vast and familiar, streetlights
yawning and stretching,
and you have never. You have never.
You have never loved someone like this.
She is your first stomach ache.
Your first panic attack and your
favorite cold shower.
A mountain is moving somewhere
inside of you, and her handprints are all over it.
Here. Here. Here, you love her.
In the fractured morning, full of
too tired and too sad, she is the first
foot that leaves the bed.
She is the fight in you, the winning
and the losing battle
floating like a shipwreck in your chest.
When they ask you what your favorite moment is,
You will say Her.
You will always say Her."
Caitlyn Siehl, Her, Her, Her
I’ve had to do a few things of late that have been really quite difficult. Mostly because I’ve been deeply ambivalent about doing them. For the majority of my life I thought ambivalence was about not caring, when actually it’s about caring in different directions--wanting two things that seem to oppose one another. I both desperately want this and desperately don’t.
I can hold those opposing truths in both hands at the same time. The libra in me tries to weigh them, but that’s not really the point.
I am fine. And I am not.
This is okay. And also, it is not.
I both want this and really, really don’t.
I recently had to make a decision about something and was torn by my warring desires. I spoke to my girlfriends and got their advice, but realized, at the end of the day, the decision was mine alone. And that decision didn’t really have anything to do with my wants or needs, so much as what I believe. What I believe in. Which is to say, my value system.
Which is to say, who I am.
Value systems are incredible because they cut through the noise very, very quickly. And a path erupts before us. But very often that path is the most difficult--mostly because it has to do with vulnerability and telling the truth.
So I swipe on an extra coat of lipstick for courage and practice remaining soft--feeling the things--all. of. the. things--that are so very hard, but give life nearly all of its meaning.
