“how do you measure
the love you’ve survived?
in scars on your heart?
songs in your head?
memories held in skin cells
no longer yours to shed?”
I’ve never been one to give up on things. Which is what made walking away from the man I loved so harrowing. Four years spent with another human isn’t exactly nothing. And all those dreams we created together weren’t just leaves blowing in the wind.
In fact, walking away from the man I loved was the hardest decision I’ve made in the third-of-a-century timespan of experience I know as my silly little one-and-only life. But here it is, in all the paradox glory of its simultaneous self-inflicted loneliness and self-empowered freedom.
Seven months since, and counting.
And here I am, returning my own self to the center of a galaxy where two hearts are no longer one. Where the Sun now stands alone amid an entire universe of constellations, somewhere out there. Living-dying stars and firework supernovas set among the black nothingness of infinity’s bleak beyond.
Here I am again, the single woman. The center of my universe.
Poetic, isn’t it?
December 27
There’s a spot of fresh blood, mine, on my favorite sundress; another on the sun-colored blanket I brought home from our van-life trip through Oaxaca last year, sleeping like a fading future at the foot of our bed ever since.
I would have expected more broken glass from that handheld device, now lying shattered beside the concrete step where I smashed its face into a million little pieces, like the mosaic of memories that might remain once the anger fades and we’ve finally laid this whole thing to rest where it belongs.
I should regret what’s been lost to forever, photographs and songs, stories and still frames; the hard drive of a life lived together, in steady cycles of beauty and rage, easy love and my desert island of pain.
As frigid words fell heavy from my lips, blood dripped from my fingertips like wild-flickering flames, holding their own beneath the waterfall faucet; extinguished in slow streams, swirling gently, like our big and little dreams, slowly and quickly, completely down the drain.
For what’s left in the quiet rubble of a waking nightmare but the cemetery solace of relief and the stoic witness of grandmother trees, whispering nostalgia for all the winds that never will have been?
January 7
We brought home a two-month-old Rottweiler puppy who looks like a Pitbull chocolate lab. She might have been ours, together, had that cookie crumbled any different. Had I tried a little harder to forgive, again.
A few weeks back, we named her, together, and tonight after sunset we set her tiny, squirmy body into a backpack between us on the motorbike, and journeyed along the bumpy muddy road a few miles down the beach, to the home we had made our own, together; garden lights in pink plumeria trees on the bluff overlooking a perfectly endless sea.
I knew home would be the hardest dream to leave.
But people don’t stay together for puppies.
And indeed, neither did we.
****
“If dreams are like movies,
then memories are films about ghosts.
You can never escape,
you can only move south down the coast.”
****
March 1
I know I shouldn't. But that's probably why I want to. Or at least why I wanted to, before the carnal fantasy wore off and the broken-record reality set in. Why can I never leave well-enough alone? A steamy hot daydream in all its unbridled, un-messy, un-complicated desire. You'd think by now I'd have learnt that lesson, and well.
But no. Not this gal. And yet again, not this time.
So there he was, nearly a decade younger than me, popped right out of my steamy-surfy daydream and sitting across from me, confidence feigned, at the borrowed kitchen table in the temporary home I had sublet for puppy and me.
We had nothing to talk about. But I tried anyway. He fingered my toe ring as it trembled, noticeably. He stood up to shorten the distance between us. I struggled to break down the walls I had built, so impeccably, to protect my body, and with it my former partner’s absolute control over my earthly desires, from the likes of any possible man, let alone this actual man, standing before me now in the hot flesh of reality, ironically in this rented home with no walls to hide inside anymore.
Still, and strangely, the most peculiar part about it, is that while it's a secret to most everyone in my world, the shame I feel is more about the shame I don't feel that I still somehow believe I should.
Four years with one man occupying my sacral space, sowing seeds of distrust through his own dirty-little lies covered over in mole-hill mountains of deceit, projected onto me and then internalized into my womb-psyche in the form of caging myself in, blinders around my desires to the point that even allowing myself to be looked at - let alone wanted - by another man, grew akin to cardinal sin.
Months after the breakup, in the unwelcome shame of days like today, I know it’s going to take more than a daydream magician to make all that conditioning into misogyny fade slowly into a nearly forgotten memory.
Yet, in bringing my fleshy fantasy to full-blown reality, I like to believe that perhaps I was setting myself somehow, and irrevocably, a little bit free.
…If only that tired old bitch shame would fuck off and let me be.
May 5
“Wanna quarantine n chill .”
No time for pleasantries like pronouns or proper punctuation, stranger to my inbox got straight to the point. That wasn’t ever going to happen. But unfortunately for me, it wouldn’t be the last of my pandemic love fails in the months after the world shut down; and with it, the prospects for my newfangled polyamorous identity, core to the story I wrote myself into as a coping strategy for post-breakup life as the single woman.
Let’s just say wrong side-up latex really knows how to kill the mood.
And steamy hot showers sometimes fall flat by the time we reach the bedroom.
And attempts to bend me over a driftwood tree trunk beneath a full moon without so much as a kiss – because ‘quarantine’ – are never going to play out the way you want them to.
Where I had envisioned a swinging carousel of romantic love affairs, it turned out polyamory and pandemic were not exactly two synonymous peas in my pod of love beyond love lost. And while my ex, I learned, moved on swimmingly indulging his desires in a steady rotation of substances and women willing to ease the pain, I settled into a stint of circumstantial celibacy for which there would prove to be no easy escape.
The single woman, in the quarantined pandemic of all her pent-up glory.
June 21
I’ve been crying for everyone lately. I’ve been crying for the women who share their all-too-common stories of despair and abuse in our writing group. I’ve been crying for Black lives lost to police violence and institutionalized racism. I’ve been crying for youth in Native American communities taking their own lives because the future must look bleaker to them than death. I’ve been crying for elderly people dying of COVID alone in sterile hospital rooms because their adult children are too scared to hold their hands while they fight for their last breath. I’ve been crying for girlfriends walking away from unhealthy relationships while they hold their tired hearts in their own hands.
I’ve been crying for everyone, a lot, lately. Even in places I know I shouldn’t.
On June 5, we held a peaceful paddle-out protest in solidarity with Black Girls Surf. I cried from start to finish. And felt ashamed for my tears, from start to finish. They had no place.
What right do I have to cry for injustice borne by others in a system that privileges people with skin colored like mine, at the expense of people with skin colored like theirs? My grief had no place, that I know.
Still, my voice faltered as I spoke words I hoped might mean something, and tears streamed down my face for the deaths of people I would never come to know. For histories unrepaired for which I have no right to mourn because my existence is implicated with the side of the oppressor. I felt embarrassed and wrong for feeling, and worse for not being able to turn it off and say their names and sit in silence and paddle out and say some things worth saying at a time where words from mouths colored like mine have said enough and should just have nothing more to say.
And I wonder if my tears out of place are evidence of what they mean when they say I must be feeling quite satisfied with myself right now. Maybe all those tears for everyone are simply self-righteous, the soft underbelly of my white fragility, and nothing more.
Who am I to say?
I’ve been crying for everyone lately. But not for me. For me I haven’t cried in months. In all my running, my tears have had no place. So they’ve stayed away and in, held and mostly unfelt. Because I wanted it all to be a thing of the past, and crying for me felt like crying for him, and I’d be damned if I did any more of that.
So I’ve been running, and crying for everyone else lately, instead.
Until today, the day I put my phone away and faced my solitude in the beckoning silence of jungle and waves, when the light was longest and too strong not to see into the spaces I’ve been hiding from myself - running, not crying for me.
And now, six months later and a few hundred miles away from my life, I’m crying into my sweet potato soup for what feels like no good reason at all. As the toasted sesame swirled with sunflower and pumpkin seeds like something out of a culinary magazine, I salted them in the scathing privilege of ten indulgent minutes of tears cried for nobody but me.
Tomorrow I imagine I’ll be back to crying for everyone and wishing I wasn’t carrying a grief so big I have no right to feel.
But tonight I’ll cry in the pathetically self-satisfying shame of remembering what it’s like to cry, only and lonely, for silly little me.
Redefining self-satisfied, one salty soup-scoop at a time.
July 24
It’s the eve of the day out of time, and right now the body doesn’t want to write. She wants to dance, play, love, jump out of the skin she’s in and run to what’s out there, what makes her come alive.
She wouldn’t tell you, but she’s been stuck in a muck.
There’s a weight on her chest she’s been pretending doesn’t exist because it slows her down too much to care anymore about someone she cared too much for, for far too long. Her mind feels free; her body her own now, entirely intact and prudishly alone for months, might be ready to come out of hiding.
Until she considers: for what? For whom? The same let down with a different disappointing face, an illusion disturbed by the reality of god-are-they-really-all-the-same?
Because the most damaging thing about staying too long in the nightmare of places you no longer belong, is that you start believing love is only a momentary euphemism for a lonely lifetime; salted with sunshine, peppered in pain.
And so, like a rainy day, today the body rests like a child against her will, dreaming fruitlessly to break free, to be with somebody other than me, if only for the sunset poetry of a starlit midnight reverie.
*All images by Taya Lynn Photography / @tayaphotography