Sometimes it amazes me how many paths I've traveled. In what feels like another lifetime ago, I was almost married, sharing--for years, my space and life and thoughts and words and everything with a man who was great in nearly every way, except I wasn't ready for him. Had I stayed with him, kept on that path, I wouldn't have gone to school for my writing, I wouldn't have traveled, I wouldn't have done anything but been a good mother and a good wife and had a perfectly just fine life. Except even though I wasn't ready for that, it was something else I knew but couldn't articulate, the constant barrage of negativity, the tireless critiquing, the effort of catching up. I wasn't ready and I wasn't his equal and so I turned off that road, a sharp turn, a wild move, no one anticipated it and everyone thought I was crazy, but I had to go.
And in between I worked at the cafe, learned the dry cleaning business, had my first taste of personal assisting and was a nanny for an extremely wealthy family. If I was going to be the perfect wife, I had to learn how. My brain needed to be fed new things to learn and my body needed to be worn out to the point of exhaustion to make me numb.
When I ran away, I threw myself into the arms of the first man who paid me any attention, and luckily for me he was just about everything I needed at the time with a lot of things I didn't need thrown in for good measure. His artistic philosophies and commitment to his craft inspired me. His love for noise and smoke charmed me. His world was new and fascinating. There were stories everywhere. For the first time I was with someone who didn't want to be in a relationship with me except he was everything I thought I was looking for, so I let myself fall and fall hard, because falling seemed to be required. As I went to school and worked to the point of exhaustion, I learned how to keep a healthy distance and in that time alone I learned myself. In his eyes, he wasn't good enough for me, in my eyes I wasn't good enough for him; it was no wonder that it didn't work.
I hunkered down for the winter. School was there, work was there. I learned how to smoke. I listened to music. I wrote stories.
And then, when I least expected it, there was the burnham, who coincidence seemed to deliver as if hand-picked, so many times I wondered how dare I deny the fates that brought us together. There were so many perfect stories that circled around our union, all of them relied on not just one or two coincidences but a perfect storm of moments. And so I went along, trying to see what it was the universe wanted, why it had me collide with another who was in so many ways exactly what I needed, wanted and desired, except his heart was full of sadness and anger and there was no room for me in there. We drank to numb the pain of holding on to the thing that once loved you that we could not fathom why it loved us to begin with. After we bloodied our figurative heads and hands on each other's walls, fate intervened and diverged our paths as if we never met. And to think, I loved him with the aching agony of chemical, mental and physical desire, never to know him again. He was the mirror of my emotions that I could not have seen otherwise and for him I am eternally grateful.
All the while, there was this place, the cafe, where I grew up and learned how to conduct myself as a well balanced, articulate and lovely human being. When I began working there, I was painfully shy and extremely misanthropic. Every time I worked there I was afforded the opportunity to rise above a challenge, and for a long time I sank, gurgling in the depths of anger and choking on my own selfishness. It took me a long time to grow up. Nearly fifteen years I worked there, and somewhere around the ninth year I finally understood that no one gave a shit if I was sad or mad or tired or hungry or any other emotion. It didn't matter. No matter how hard I tried, nothing really mattered. There was never enough I could do, I could never be good enough, but I could certainly make it worse by complaining all about it. If it didn't matter what I was, I could be anything I wanted. I slowly revealed who I wanted to be, petal by petal.
Sometimes I think back to those lives, how deeply entrenched I was, how terrified I was that I was never going to get out, how I always felt a sense of foreboding and could never quite explain why, I just did. My intuition led me away, took me to school to do fiction writing and held my hand through all the jobs and pain. I didn't know why, I just followed.
So I quit working so hard. I stopped being in relationships. I got numb as often as possible for those and other reasons or out of habit and somewhere along the way I woke up into a dream:
He eviscerated me with words. He lavished me with more words. He made me laugh, made me wonder, made me proud of myself. He freely shared joyful things with me, all with a delightful grin of bemusement. His sense of whimsy and play is one of the best I've encountered. He was another candidate to be everything I ever wanted, except this time I had one thing on my mind, despite my intuition's firm approval, I had to be careful. So he came from far away to meet me and he made me feel comfortable and at ease. There are only a handful of people I've ever felt that way with, my family, a few close friends, children I babysit for, and him. And yet, he challenged me in ways that I can only say would have been difficult and tedious from anyone else but I took timid steps to meet his challenges and mostly succeeded at them.
I found myself eating dinner in a fancy restaurant, swept away in conversation, and staring across the table at a man I had known for less than forty eight hours (in one sense) and not needing to be anywhere else or do anything else or wanting anything else. It wasn't too this or that, I wasn't too this or that, he wasn't too this or that. Everything was just right. And I was incredulous and just a bit dubious. How easy is it when there is distance and a vacuum of time to enjoy each other? I wondered.
When he left, I resolved to go to his world, to learn his life, to see what he could not say about himself out of a refreshing humbleness and quiet reserve. I didn't know what I was looking for, just curious to see what it was and if I would recognize anything. I flew to him. I held my heart at bay, even though that part of me knew it was a useless endeavor, I still tried to maintain a safe distance just in case I was wrong.
(I never planned on it being right. Because being right is something I got used to not having. I learned to live without the good things, I let myself get by on the little dribblings of love I got from other areas in my life, I expected that when things could go a certain way, they would go the wrong way.)
I found myself in the woods, with no makeup on, no one around, wearing strange new clothes and eating delicious food and learning new things and sharing it all with him. I was none of the things that usually make me happiest, I had none of those things to rely on, there was nothing in the middle of nowhere and it was just right.
So this is my life now, I live in a dream. Everything is just right: I like where I live, I like where I work, I love who I say I love. I worry about waking up; it's hard for me not to. I stopped getting numb so much just to make sure I wasn't dreaming. Someday I will believe what I already know, that I'm already awake, but until then, I will let them be sweet dreams.
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