It Is Good

It is good.
It is so challenging sometimes
that I think I want to scream
or cry out in fear
and lack of strength
but
it is good.

It is good.
Your eyes match mine and
at night when we are finally
alone
they soak me in
And I can trust you again.
I can trust myself with you again.
And it is good.

It is good.
When a little is crying
and I feel alone in your house
and like an ogre next to your
soft, kind children
with tears streaming down their cheeks,
It is good.

It is good.
It is a test of all my strong parts
and I realize in the darkness
of your bathroom
at two in the morning
that this fear I have of
running out of patience and strength
is completely irrational
because I am not the person
I once was,
anymore, but instead I am
exactly who I have always wanted
to become.
It is good.

It is good.
I never imagined I would be in this place
with you
and the littles,
but I am, and
it is good.

Making Peace

To my past self,

It is Sunday evening, May 11, 2014. The air is warm and the sun is spilling golden light all over this little corner of the city. There are fresh herbs growing on my back porch, and the man of my dreams left his handsome cologne scent all over my sheets last night and this morning. It has been a bit of a retreat weekend for the two of us, as he managed to sneak away from his three beautiful young children to take me out on a date for the first time in a month. We sat in a secluded booth at an Italian restaurant and giggled like high school kids the whole night.

            I know it seems so unbelievable to you right now, but life will be better. So very much better. There is a gnawing inside of you that keeps you up at night, keeps you aching for something more. You don’t have to try to squelch it. And you can stop trying to change that boy. He will always love you, and he will need you desperately, as he does now. But you don’t really need him, and there is something inside you that knows that. You are packing your whole life into one big shipping container and about to move over 800 miles and an entire time zone away from everything and everyone familiar. Even though there is some invisible force you can’t explain that drives you to move, to change, you half believe that at any moment you will crumble under the weight of it. Shrivel into a ball of fear and demons and pain. You doubt your own strength, though. All you’ve ever known is the you who has needed a man to feel complete. But rest assured, there will come a time when you realize your own inner anchor. You are scared to death of being alone, but I promise that when you learn to embrace yourself, you won’t be disappointed. You are strong enough. And you will prove it to yourself over and over in the years to come. You are starting a new chapter, and standing in the doorway to a new life. It will challenge you, and there will be tears. Oh so many tears. But today I am here to tell you that you will be okay. You will make mistakes. You will form friendships that will last you the rest of your life. And you will end relationships that seem to crush you from the inside out. But the one thing that remains is your own truth and love. Forgive yourself. Each day. And keep offering that forgiveness to others, because God knows we all deserve redemption.

            Your dreams will come true, dear one. Because you refuse to settle for anything less. And because you will find the only real source of contentment in yourself. 

Love,

Me

The Next Step

I'm not going to distract myself from the pain of heartbreak by running into the arms of someone else. Or by shamelessly flirting with strangers online so I feel better about myself. Or by lying to myself about why it didn't work out. Or by blaming anyone else for my own mistakes. Or by drinking enough alcohol to blur my vision and my feelings. Or by keeping someone on an emotional hook so that they could fill the empty places when I am sad. Or by eating my way to comfort. Or any of the other all-too-numerous ways that I have shamelessly avoided and distracted myself in the past.

I am not going to search for my own meaning and significance in someone else's words. Or someone else's heart. Because really, how many times have I done that, and then wound up with someone else's (well-meaning, perfectly lovely) version of me to live up to? A version that, however nice, just didn't fit me perfectly. A version I began to resent the other person for creating because I couldn't live up to it. A version I hated myself for because I couldn't live up to it.

All problems I could have avoided had I just turned inward instead. Had I just sat through the pain, and felt it.

So now I am.

I am going to sit with my pain. My grief. My demons. I will not ignore them anymore. I will not ask another to fight them for me.

I will not shy away from the solitude. From the loneliness. In my sweet, Christian bubble world, being without a partner, a soul mate, a husband, meant that God was still preparing me, still molding me, still teaching me some unknown lesson I needed before I could move on to the next stage of life. The loneliness, then, was a sign of my failure in faith. (Because if I could just learn the lessons I was supposed to, then God would reveal my husband to me.) Besides, I was taught that I should never let myself feel lonely because God was always there for me. If the whole world walked out on me, at least God was there.

If I felt lonely then, it was simply because I was rejecting God's comfort.

Yet, this idea just doesn't agree with me anymore. As a thirty-two year old divorcee living alone in a big city, my idea of God has evolved quite a bit over the years. As a result, I find myself questioning all of the pillars of faith I used to cling to so intensely growing up.

And years of heartache and relationship failures have brought me here. To this place.

Another heartbreak. Looking back, I see my own behaviors repeating themselves. My own twisted expectations and selfish desires have come back to haunt me, and (surprise!) resulted in another loss. Another person hurt.

And I am alone again.

Except this time, I won't push against the loneliness. I am sitting with it, each day, each hour, each achingly cold, painful minute. I am letting it wash over me. Like standing at the shore in January, openly and purposefully letting the icy salt water spill over my exposed skin. Not running away, but completely feeling the shock of it. Breathing through the intensity. Closing my eyes and experiencing every piercing needle.

Because maybe if I can face it, and face all the ugliness inside myself, then maybe I can figure out a way to love myself anyway.

I think it's the only way I'll ever learn to be whole.

"When we draw a line down the center of a page, we know who we are if we’re on the right side and who we are if we’re on the left side. But we don’t know who we are when we don’t put ourselves on either side. Then we just don’t know what to do. We just don’t know. We have no reference point, no hand to hold. At that point we can either freak out or settle in. Contentment is a synonym for loneliness, cool loneliness, settling down with cool loneliness. We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength. Usually we have to give up this belief about a billion times, again and again making friends with our jumpiness and dread, doing the same old thing a billion times with awareness. Then without our even noticing, something begins to shift. We can just be lonely with no alternatives, content to be right here with the mood and texture of what’s happening." -Pema Chodron

Dear Atlanta

Dear Atlanta,

Wikipedia tells me that you are nicknamed "city in a forest" and at 36%, your tree coverage is the most of any major US city. This makes me happy. Mostly because trees are the lungs of the earth and I love getting a blissful oxygen rain whenever I sit under them. Wikipedia also says you have the third-largest concentration of Fortune-500 companies in the country. This is pretty impressive, for sure. But I must admit, it's a bit intimidating for a small school teacher like me. I'm just hoping that somewhere in the midst of all your trees and Fortune-500 companies, you have a little place for me.

Yours Truly,
Leah

Waiting

The days pass with the kind of aching slowness that makes me doubt mankind's true understanding of Earth's rate of revolution in space.

Why does it feel like I am always waiting?

For the end of the work day. For Friday afternoon happy hour. For that phone call. For something to change. 

Do the changes happen deep inside me, on a scale so small and slowly moving that I cannot perceive them? I try so hard to change and grow and get better every day. I so try. But sometimes I swear it feels like my shoes and hands are glued to a treadmill and someone thought it would be funny to unplug it and watch me struggle.
....

I just want my heart to feel alive again.

The Night I Say Goodbye to You

I watch you walk away.
Your scent still lingers on my skin
And I linger in the parking lot,
feeling frail and tired from
all the trembling in my insides.

A sliver of moon hangs
low and red in the night sky,
a sharpened sickle, mischevious,
and slick with blood.

I look down
and wouldn't be surprised
to see a stream
flowing out from my own chest.

It happened so fast.

I don't feel the pain yet.
But I know it is on it's way.

For now I just sit and stare,
Amazed at both the love we share
and the damage done.

"Is this the end?" I ask the moon.
The tears (and better judgment)
behind my eyes scream
"Of course it is, you idiot!"

But the hope beating,
bleeding,
in my chest whispers,
"Wait and see."

The problem with memories

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer? ~Lord Byron

 

Recently, memories of my honeymoon have haunted me. I have been waking up in the middle of the night, wracking my brain to recall every detail of my few days in Hawai'i with my new husband. This honeymoon was ten years ago.

I have bits and pieces. Small details like the smell of my lotion, the color of the bedspread, the feel of the rental car. I can remember general events. Like how we went snorkeling one day, how we shopped in a street market another day, and toured a pineapple plantation on another. But the real details, the parts that I wish I could remember clearly, are the exact same parts that will forever remain foggy in my mind.

If you had asked me to recall these details just a year or so into our marriage, I would have smiled broadly and not hesitated to brag about our trip. How excited we both were. How the plane ride seemed to last an eternity, how John had done such an amazing job planning our activities and finding our condo. I would have painted you a picture of two blissful newlyweds, giddy with young love and oblivious to most of the world around us. (And it is at this very moment that I remember one tiny fragment of a memory. Goosebumps form on my arms as it hits me for the first time in years. There was a pool in the center of an open courtyard in our building. One afternoon we were coming back from a day of adventures around the island, laughing and hanging onto each other as only a happy couple can. We were poking fun at each other and John threatened to pick me up and throw me in the pool. I feigned a look of shock but then dared him to try, quickly darting away from his grasp. And although I was fast, he was faster, and he caught me quickly, laughed as he swept me off my feet, and proceeded to hurl both himself and me into the pool. We rose to the surface fully clothed and even more hysterical than we were before we jumped in.)

Yet, if you asked me to recall what I remembered from our honeymoon a year after our divorce, a much different picture would have emerged from my mind. The demise of our relationship and the bitter ending in the courtroom would have somehow leaked into my honeymoon memories, staining even the fondest of recollections. I would have told you about how I felt a sting of disappointment when all I really wanted to do was stay in bed with my new husband, but that all he wanted was to get out and adventure around the island. I would have told you how I hated the feeling of tension between us in even trying to order dinner out at a restaurant. Was I dressed well enough for him? Did I order the right food so he would feel I had appropriately impressed the waitress and the patrons sitting around us? I would have easily remembered the bitterness I felt when he was almost too embarassed to pull off the road for me to take pictures of the tropical countryside because he was worried about what other people would think. I would have told you that all the signs of our failure as husband and wife were all there, all along.

 

Or were they?

As I have been plagued by questions these last few nights, the wisdom of the daylight has brought me just one conclusion: that we only truly remember the moment we live in right now. Once this moment is gone from us, our perception of the past begins to shift and change as time passes, as our emotions ebb and flow, and as we allow others to impart their own bias on the memory.

I was convinced the other night that perhaps if I just made a phone call to my estranged ex-husband, I could ask him about his own perception of these memories that have been haunting me. Surely he could shed some light on what really happened. But no, this is not really a solution. Because just as I have shifted and changed in my own understanding of what happened to us and to our marriage, so has he.

So, in reality, asking the question, "What *really* happened?" (as if just one version of the truth exists, apart from either one of his or my experiences) is completely useless. The "truth" of the marriage, the "truth" of our divorce, and the "truth" behind why it ended lies not in me or him, but instead, somewhere in between. A place in the past that neither of us will ever be able to accurately conjure from our memories. And not through some fault of his or my own. But simply through the nature of time.

The idea that the experience of our marriage (from it's inception when I was just fourteen to it's demise almost twelve years later) lies safely dormant in the catacombs of the past is actually more healing to me than anything else. No one's interpretation or recollection or explanations (including my own) can ever truly affect it. It is in the past. Tucked away. Perfectly preserved. Truth and all. What matters now is... well, now. This moment.

And this moment, I am strong. I am happy. And I am grateful. For my past, for my experiences, and for my ever-changing memories.