Tag: writer

Disintegrating

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I am sitting on my couch, alone in my living room, thinking about all of the people I care about and how I haven’t seen most of them in so long that I can’t remember their voices or how they smell.

My heart is breaking into a million pieces.

It might be my overly active hormones at play, but it is still real just the same.

My chest aches and my lower lashes feel the kiss of tear drops, because I miss these people. But it is more than that. I am proud of them. Real damn proud.

I think about acquaintance friends with whom I haven’t visited in many years—how they are married now or having kids. I can watch them through the filtered screen of social media. I see their lives growing and changing.

My old best friend from grade school is a successful fashion consultant with her own company in NYC. I was just visiting her website and admiring how professionally and elegantly done it was. My old best friend has accomplished so much. I can hardly believe the magnificence of humans, sometimes.

The first man I said “I love you” to recently got engaged.

Everyone’s lives are just branching out like a well-mannered fractal into outer space. These lovely branches curving and splitting, and my heart just wants to burst with genuine excitement and joy in the happiness that is others’.

I don’t know if my mind is searching out these longing memories tonight because my hormones are peaking for a window of time due to PMDD, or because I’ve experienced loss so near in the past.

I might not have another Tuesday night with my best female friend. Tuesday was our day. She’d come over with beer or wine and we’d sit and talk or watch a girly movie. There’s been a rift between us, and I haven’t even had the chance to explain myself or talk to her, because she has protectively boarded up her emotional walls and shut me off like water lines in the middle of winter, so the pipes don’t burst.

I said goodbye to a man I have loved fiercely and passionately for over a year. I don’t know if I’ll ever smell his hair again or try hopelessly to get him to open his eyes wide enough to stare into mine for more than two or three seconds.

And he—this man—has accomplished so much. I haven’t been able to be there for any of it, but I’ve cheered from the sidelines and been supportive from the other end of the phone. I’ve pushed him to fight for what he loves, and I’ve lost everything I could have ever had with him to the gamble of his potential success, hanging out there in the future like an amorphous, looming question mark.

I want to take this palpitating heart of mine and shred it up into tiny fibers. Little thread-like viscera. I want to connect myself physically to all of those people who have ever mattered to me. The friends I haven’t forgotten. Loved beings who have amazed me all this time.

Yet… I can’t.

I can’t, and that’s why it’s paining me. To have to stay whole when I want to be a part of everyone. To have to continue to live my own life when my memories dredge up nostalgic yearning to be close to others. To walk my own path, knowing I could never see any of these people ever again. And that I would just have to be okay with that.

Who can always just be okay with that?

Not even the strongest person is truly at peace with the reality that something they love so much might never be close enough to them again that they can just reach out and touch it; embrace it; breathe in the essence of it, whether it be their voice, their graceful demeanor, their smile, their laugh, or just the comfort that is silently acknowledged between two people when they are relieved to be in another’s presence.

And since I am only little Amanda and possess no tool set to cope with this massive sense of loss—this deprivation of familiarity—I wrap up into myself in the fetal position in my bed and cry. I write. I love everything and everyone I can while I can. I hug tightly, say I love you genuinely, and kiss like I’m nominated to win an award for it.

My body is the glue that holds me together, while my thoughts and tears scatter across time.

Not all of these people, or even most of them, probably know how much I hold love for them still in my heart.

One knew. He told me so. I whimpered to him through desperate, emotion-laden declarations that for so long I was afraid to tell him how much I loved him. Right then, he cut me off and said, “You didn’t have to say it. I knew.”

There’s a calming feeling that comes with the knowledge of his heart knowing my heart so intimately all this time without me ever having to verbally confirm that what we felt was real.

For those I’ve lost or not seen, and may never see again, if they could know my love is expansive and unyielding in its many forms, then I am connected to each, instead of my fear of disintegrating into a pile of ash, like every time the one I love steps out my front door.

Unsettled

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Is it weird that my heart breaks when my ex talks about his relationship woes?

The drive from Willimantic to Southbridge was nice. We needed to catch up, since it had been a few months since we had seen each other, and we text far less now that he has a girlfriend with whom he lives.

When I parked on the steep hill and stepped out of the car to find him on his front stoop, I wasn’t sure if she was there… if I should go introduce myself. Turns out, she had left the house before I arrived, so he got in my driver’s side and drove us to my mom’s, since I had just been driving for an hour. I joked with him that it’s fine, because I was too lazy to ever take him off my insurance.

On the way, we talked mostly about him—how things have been going with the girl; how involved he is with his church. We passed the cemetery I once peed in, because I couldn’t wait any longer, and I pointed and said, “I peed in that cemetery.” J replied, “Yup. And we were listening to Death Cab for Cutie. Fond memory of the early days.”

At my mother’s, he was his usual reticent self. While my sister chattered on about work and gardening, J pulled out his phone and silently played a game. Occasionally, he would say a word or two, but mostly he’d pause to look up at the tv and then back at his phone.

This might be regarded as rude, but it’s not. It’s just J. As soon as someone engages him in conversation, he’ll talk. He’s just always been the more introverted, quiet observer-type.

Out on the deck with my sister, I commented, “I was thinking about how quiet J was being and then I remembered J is always that quiet.” She goes, “Yeah. That’s J.”

It did not feel odd in the slightest to have him there with us while we celebrated my mom’s birthday. My sister provided a delicious dinner and we sat around and talked for a while. My belly was full, my eyes were stinging from cigarette smoke, and I was starting to get a headache, so very shortly after my sister departed, we decided to, also.

On the drive home, there was more serious talk about our relationships and god. It’s so fascinating to me how, now, we agree on so many things, that I give him advice and insight, and he listens and understands. We’ve traversed miles of communication barriers and selfishness in the four-plus years we’ve been apart.

We both wondered if we’d only ever be each other’s one shot at “it”. I told him that sometimes I thought so. Maybe that was our chance for love and we couldn’t do it. Maybe we are both destined not to find our “ones”. Those chances were buried just like the graves next to which I relieved my full bladder on one of our happy, free-spirited rides when love was young and rife with hope.

There’s only one other person since J who has remotely made me feel the way J has in terms of depth of connection and romance. In terms of overflowing emotion and true compassion and appreciation for their existence. He knows who he is.

But lately, I’ve just been wading endlessly in an ocean with a hazy horizon point. I can’t tell where I’m going, where I’m supposed to go, and what I’ll find when I get there.

Since I already have found what I’m looking for, twice, I don’t really know what else I’m supposed to uncover.

It’s been a long four years of feeling unsettled. Even when I was in my on-and-off-again relationship with my other ex after J, I never felt assured. I had no idea if he loved me or not, and he continually kept me dangled on some potential hope we might live together only to sabotage things and pull it away from me.

For years, I’ve learned only to trust myself. To love myself. And to know that even if I never find the “one”, I have enough self-love that I’ll be fine.

That doesn’t mean my heart doesn’t break whenever I think about the one who got away from me, or the ones who won’t give me a fair chance. That doesn’t mean that although I would not get back together with J, my heart doesn’t wrench and sizzle with anger that he’s dealing with immaturity or a person who doesn’t share the same aspirations and passions.

I want to cloak and protect him, maybe because we couldn’t protect ourselves from each other.

Maybe because I’ve been guarding and protecting myself for so long, it’s the only thing I know how to do.

Obsessed

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I think every serious writer is a bit obsessed.

She’s infatuated with words. Specifically, her words. She’s never satisfied with her vocabulary. Scribbled notes adorn scrap paper—ideas for things about which she wants to write. Fearing a good thought will go to waste, she has a hard time parting with any of her years-old scraps, usually tossed into a folder or heaped in a desk drawer.

A serious writer reads and re-reads her work dozens of times before publishing. Even then, she reads it some more, in case she’s missed something. Always scouring for a grammatical error or the perfect position to place an important insight.

She defines herself as a writer. She jokes that ink runs through her veins instead of mere mortal blood. She feels like a conduit for the universe’s silent language and song. It is her honor to ensure the unspoken gets transcribed so it can be committed to the bank of human understanding and memory.

She reads a lot. She’s imbued with fantasy, whim, heaviness, and stardust. Hours alone are her favorite, as she can prepare her art form uninterrupted. Inspiration comes at a stop sign, while listening to a podcast, after a heart-breaking evening, and in the shower—every writer’s worst nightmare, because a pen is not nearby.

She thinks about the book she will someday write when the perfect storm coalesces with a stroke of genius. She knows she might never write that book.

She writes every day. On days when she can’t, she feels the withdrawal; the same pull that addicts experience without their muse or playmate.

A serious writer never gives up, because even if most of the world has never read a single thing she’s ever written, the pure ecstasy of putting thoughts into tangible strings of mellifluous sentences is her truest passion.

A serious writer is obsessed, head over heels, doe-eyed in love with the written word.

She loves it more than almost anything else, and will constantly take her experiences and those she adores and decorate them in poetry, in song, in memoir, in essay, in fiction, in creative nonfiction, in novel, in journal. Any way she can, she will.

And she does.