*this piece began weeks ago and I only finally completed it yesterday
I’d like to write about love. The romantic kind. The crinkling, wobbly, do-you-want-to-remember-my-soul-next-time kind. The growing old and still repeating same stories kind. The vows spoken beneath tree canopies in the presence of moss and hidden folk kind. The love that runs parallel to platonic love but never, in my experience, outruns it. My friends, after all, have been the great loves of my life. But tonight, under a waning crescent, I think I’d like to tell you something about that other love and where I’ve buried it.
Last week I dreamt about my past marriage. A lived dream, a feral remembering. I rode a tidal wave of the ache that marked those 13 years. We were such good friends once. That was real and true and even something we’re beginning to reclaim. But I was a contained force, a roaring whisper that just did not quiet. I was cradling a grave. I was screaming for a lifeline. And at one point we both admitted that the mounting roar of our marriage was carried in the hollow recesses of his deep, consistent resentment of me. I was riding the wake of his waves, witnessing the way he nurtured relationship with everyone but me. I was wandering in the ether while he centered anyone in his periphery. I was pulsing with the pain of not being seen or chosen or wanted. And I didn’t even know if I wanted his romantic love. I just didn’t want to be cut off from his platonic love.
So last week I dreamt that ache, woke with it raging in my chest. I stayed very very still in the morning light for a long time. Before I was even fully awake I felt a part of me trying to shove it away. A wild push, a keening rejection. So I held steady, I just tried to stay. And I asked my body to let it move all the way through - a wave not emptied prematurely. Let it flood, let it recceed.
In the churning, hollow void of ache, I saw it for the first time: a doorway: a concave pit, a passing-through. And I knew what I was seeing before I could find the words to name it. When I left my marriage I left through the only door available to me. Avoidance loomed like a haven, a refuge, a hallway that would get me through 4 years of hell. So I took it. And avoidance - a learned attachment style - turned that doorway into a swollen, thick tomb; a place for romantic love to cover itself with grave clothes and go to sleep. I tucked that part of me in, made sure the blankets were tight and snug, sang it to sleep, and then walked out into the daylight. In the wake of my leaving, I shook the earth, letting rocks and boulders and dirt and roots avalanche just so - a safe place for that part of me to stay put.
To terraform our entire lives some parts of us are likely to get tucked away. It’s a protective, instinctual act. The parts of us that are fragile, small, or prone to crumbling get moved out of the way, safe from debris and shrapnel and wildfires that take entire bridges in the space of a breath. It’s not even really the leaving that changes us as much as it’s the work we do to find ourselves again once we’re gone. It’s taken me years and years of steady, consistent, untamed, sometimes feral inner territory work to even begin finding my scattered parts. And, because healing work is so lifelong, so delicate, so intricate and complicated, those parts of me cannot be rushed or forced to return. They let me know when they’re ready. They truly always do.
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