Writing New Stories

It feels as though it has been a lifetime since I have written. In some ways, it has been. My life has changed in many wonderful ways in the last few months, and I have been too busy living it to document it. Someone very special has entered my life, and with this great joy, a million new questions. And with that, the nature of this writing has changed, like a season anew.

Winter lingers. But Spring cannot be far off.

. . .

An open letter.

This is what I want to tell you: The man I love is good enough. Here’s why:

He’s kind. He’s generous. He has really good character. He loves his family. His family is worthy of being loved. He is smart. He is creative. He is sensitive. He is good to me. He is a good man. And he loves me. HE LOVES ME! In six months he has shown me he loves me more than another man was capable of showing me in 11 years. And I think I must be the luckiest girl in the world.

But he is five years younger than me, and by his own admission, kind of a fuck-up. He drinks a little too much and lives his life a little too recklessly. He doesn’t know why someone like me would love someone like him. Which leads me to ask, should I be wondering the same thing?

What does this mean? At 25 I thought I knew what I wanted for my life. I had committed myself to someone who I thought knew what they wanted for their life. I was wrong. Not about what it meant to be in love with someone, because that has always come easily for me. I was wrong about knowing what it meant to be loved, and about what it is to love myself. I realize this is my experience and no one else's. It would be unfair to tell someone that I understand their life experience simply because I know what my life has been like. It would be unfair to judge someone like that. But it wouldn’t be unfair to judge current experiences by past ones, would it? Isn’t that called learning from your mistakes? And yes, age is just a number, but in some ways, I am at a different place in my life than him. Because I don’t have time to make the same mistake again. I hate saying that aloud. It makes me feel so old. It makes me fear that this man, any man, will run away from me, terrified that I want him to settle down in a “stable” job, so we can have a house in the suburbs, and 2.5 kids. Because that is what my life is supposed to look like. That’s what everyone wants for me. Shouldn’t that be what I want for myself?

To be honest, I don’t believe this is why I don’t have time to make the same mistakes again. The real reason is that I am afraid of starting my life over once again. Because it is one thing to start your life over at 30; starting over at 35 or 40 is another thing. No one wants that for their children or for their friends. No one wants that for themselves.

So maybe I don’t want the house with the picket fence in the suburbs. Maybe I don’t want 2.5 kids, not now anyway. I’m not sure if I ever will. But I do want stability. I do want my partner to be someone I can count on.

I want to know that if I choose to make sacrifices for you, you will make them in return when the time comes. I want to know that I can depend on you, that you will take care of me when we are down on our luck, that our love is strong enough. Can you promise me that? Because falling in love with you was easy; so easy it’s almost scary. And I’m not afraid to take a risk. I know that my heart has already made decisions that my brain can’t even comprehend yet. I’m not afraid of you hurting me. I’ve been hurt before; I know I am strong, that I can survive. I’m not afraid of you. I’m afraid of me. I am afraid of my love. I am afraid of losing myself again. I’m afraid of waking up one day and realizing that I don’t know who I am anymore, that I have become a reflection of you and of your dreams. And most of all, I am afraid of believing in you more than you believe in yourself. Because if that happens, I haven’t learned a thing.

So here’s what I want to say to you. I love you. I love you just the way you are. I love being your girlfriend and I love the way you love me. And I understand that you are at a different place in your life and you want and need to experience that right now. I don’t want to take that away from you; if I did you would only resent me for it later. And when you’re ready to move to the next place, I will be ready. That is, if I can wait for you.

But if you think that I am going to dedicate my life, leave behind people and places I love, and take this journey with someone who is not ready for the next step, you’ve got another thing coming. And If you think you can just fall back on being ‘a fuck-up’ so you don’t have to be accountable to yourself or to me, well then forget about it. Yes, I have expectations of you, because I have expectations for my life, and I’m not going to fuck it up again. I don’t have time for that.

So if you love me, if you really love me the way you say you do, then don’t fuck this up. And please, don’t waste my time.

. . .

This will be my last entry in this blog. I started this writing because I needed to find myself, to save myself. I needed a place to do that and people to listen openly and without judgment. And it has been a place of solitude for me, but also one of forgiveness and self-discovery. And I am not done learning yet. I am not completely out of the dark. But in my tentative exploration of new love and new life, I've realized something: I am not without guidance. I do not travel alone. With this writing I have journeyed through my grief. True, the deepest, darkest places of that journey could not be faced by anyone other than myself. But I have not traveled blindly. My experiences and strength have led me through the darkness, and along the way I have discovered true friends in the most unlikely places. And at the end of that darkness, I have found a spark of life. At the end of that darkness I have found love. I have fallen in love with myself and with my life, and I am so grateful for the experiences that have made me who I am today. I know, I have always known, that I am truly blessed. But it took a journey through the darkest places inside me to really know me, to know what I am capable of. And the only place to go from here is forward. So for now, as I begin this new journey of love and life, I know it is time to say goodbye. So long, companions. Thank you for listening. May we meet again in happier places.

New Years Resolutions

New Years resolutions are supposed to be about making changes: things you want to do (or not do) differently in the new year. And after a year like the one that I've had, I could use some change. But of course this year has been filled with changes for me, and the holidays are the greatest example of this. Everyone says these days will be the hardest in the grieving process. That's probably because the holidays symbolize so much: family, tradition, togetherness, warmth, love, home. We put so much emphasis on these couple of months that January, February, and March are inevitably disappointing. And cold..and long. And unless you have someone to hold you at night, they are invariably lonely.

At Thanksgiving I wrote about all the things I was thankful for. I wrote about my surprise at being happy, and making a family out of friends. I spent my Thanksgiving in a home full of love (not my own, but love-filled nonetheless). It felt joyful to be an important (and needed!) part of someone's holiday. It was fulfilling...it was wonderful.

But then December hit. We are told there will be high points and low points in grieving, but the low points still manage to surprise us because when they hit we always think we are doing so much better. And certainly we don't expect them to last for so damn long. A down day sure, but three weeks? No thank you. I'm not sure if it was because my mom was away and out of touch (leaving me without the security of someone to vent or laugh to) or whether the holidays had finally struck me, or if it was the anniversary of that fateful day last year when the phone rang, and I was told that my husband had been hit by a car, that finally got to me. I have always considered that day to be the beginning of the end for us, a day when a slowly moving tornado began spinning my life out of control. I'm not sure why it happened, but as the days became darker and colder, I felt my heart do the same, and the darkness that fell over me took more than a few dawns to break.

But it did. Finally.

Mom came home and the phone calls resumed. A boy came into my life, to light it up, if only briefly; a play was performed, report cards written and school ended. Days came and went as usual, the holidays came as they always do, barreling along.

Christmas with my family brought light and joy back into my life. Only once did I cry, and not because I missed him but because I worried for him, because I wished I knew that he was ok. As my mom commented as we waited together in the San Antonio airport, and she held me deeply while my sadness struck like a flash thunderstorm, 'that's the funny thing about holidays. You expect them to be hard, but sometimes the reasons they are hard are more difficult to predict.'

In anticipation of the emotional difficulty I would face at Thanksgiving and Christmas, I planned my festivities with care. Thanksgiving in Chicago! With girlfriends! Christmas some place warm-with loads of family-and cowboys! But with New Years I was careless. Leaving my plans open until the last minute, with maybes and anticipation for better things, at the final hour I found my plans lacked solidity and my enthusiasm deflated. On New Years Eve you want to be with good friends. You want someone to kiss you at midnight. These are things I either failed to consider or was unable to create as I planned my New Years Eve. But I tried to make the best of it. I'll just make new friends, I thought. But that creeping, lingering sadness kicked in long before midnight, and one too many glasses of champagne later found me exchanging texts with old flames, sitting on the couch, surrounded by people, utterly alone. That's the trouble with technology. Even as we connect to friends across the city, the state, the continent, we isolate ourselves from the potential new friends sitting across from us.

And now as this new day stares me down, this new year, this blank slate and opportunity for a new start, I find I have little interest in writing new years resolutions. Do I hope for a better year in 2011? Absolutely. I'd even venture to say say I deserve it. But the reality is that this year, just like the last, will have its many ups and downs, will be a good year and a bad year, will bring both joy and disappointment. I am sometimes surprised by how taken people are with the passing of a year. I watch in wonder as a roomful of people, and a city beyond, breathlessly shout out the countdown, as Dick Clark and some other celebrity de jour enthusiastically build our anticipation. I look around at this room and at Times Square on the screen and I wonder, how many people are doing this one thing right now?? I am amazed by their shinning optimism, this momentary belief that when the clock strikes midnight, this new year will be different. Perhaps for that split second, when the countdown goes to zero and you are kissed by someone you may or may not love, perhaps then we are all a little like Cinderella, believing that true love really is possible, if only for a moment.

I did not watch the ball drop this year. Instead I watched the faces of the people around me. I watched the joy they felt, their reverence for that moment. And I tried to remember what it felt like to be that joyful. I remembered all the New Years' I had with Matt, the early ones, where he would call me from the bar where he was working, and from the crowded streets I would shout 'Happy New Year!' to him; and the later ones, the year he was sick and I cradled him in my arms as he slept, listening to the celebrations over AM radio. I remembered us together at crowded bars, when he was the only person in the room to me, and him kissing me at midnight was the only thing in the world that mattered. I look at all these shining faces, their smiles, and I can remember that optimism. And I imagine stopping time, reaching out and capturing their joy in the palm of my hand, like a kiss, or on the tip of my tongue like a champagne bubble. I can hold onto their optimism. I can even taste it. But I can't feel it. I feel nothing. So instead I tuck it away, bury it deep inside me, in that secret place where I keep things to come back to later, when it will be more useful to me. Maybe next year.

. . .

There are a lot of bits of advice out there for people in situations like mine, and it can be hard to know which ones to choose. 'Give yourself time to heal' or 'Begin changing your life today!' Resolutions are a little like that. Who among us wouldn't like to eat better, spend wiser, go to the gym more often this year? And what's more: make new friends, be gentler on ourselves, read and play with our pets more often. These are universal realities and who's to say which is the right one to choose? Resolutions are simply reminders, reminders of things we already know we should be doing, but don't as often as we should. Why? Because all too often life gets in the way.

So here is my resolution. This year I resolve not to limit myself with resolutions. I resolve that even though I will frequently fail, I will pick myself back up again and keep trying. I resolve to tie up loose ends and work towards happiness more often. I resolve to try to learn/understand what it means to love myself. I resolve to try to live my life more assertively, but more importantly, to be ok with just being me. I resolve to keep on keepin' on. And if resolutions are promises that you make to yourself, I know that's a promise I can keep.

So that's it I guess. I wouldn't say it's advice and even if it was, I wouldn't say I was anyone with the authority to be giving it. it's just where I'm at, right now. So until next time, enjoy your new year. Hold onto your optimism. Who knows? Maybe this year will be different.