Ghost town

Last night I tried to think of three things that I love about myself. I've been praying for months now - three things I'm grateful for each night. And I do usually sit in those things, and appreciate them. But they're always outside of myself.

I cried last night, thinking of things I love about myself. It felt like I broke open a part of me I had sealed.

I used to love the story from Plato's Symposium. "According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs, and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves." I wanted people to complete me - my partner, my friends, my family. I wanted them to be my strength, my bravery, my safe place. I wanted them to love me to show me I was loveable...because I didn't love myself.

It's a strange thing, loving yourself. I always thought I was okay because I didn't hate myself. I respected myself most of the time. I thought that was enough. It's all I've seen close to me, and I thought the rest was just fluff. The first visualization that asked me to imagine pouring sunshine into my body I was convinced was absurd. You told me I would love that part of meditating, but you never fully saw my darkness -- when I came in September was the first time that I felt you start to at least grasp that there was a part of me that you hadn't touched.

I let you mask my insecurities. If I felt loved by you, it was all okay. I molded you to catch me before I fell as best as anyone could, because if (when) I fell, neither one of us could catch me.

I don't want to keep hiding behind my partner. I don't want another half. I want to be whole. I want to love myself fully, and I want my confidence to radiate from that.

"i do not want to have you
to fill the empty parts of me
i want to be so full on my own
i want to be so complete
i could light a whole city
and then
i want to have you
cause the two of us combined
could set it on fire"

11:11 (again)

"Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage

might work: Because you wear pink but write poems

about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell

at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,

loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,

gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials

from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.

You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents

of what you packed were written inside the boxes.

Because you think swans are overrated.

Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me

to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.

Because you underline everything you read, and circle

the things you think are important, and put stars next

to the things you think I should think are important,

and write notes in the margins about all the people

you’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.

Because you make that pork recipe you found

in the Frida Kahlo Cookbook. Because when you read

that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing

except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self

and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights

are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed

over the windows, you still believe someone outside

can see you. And one day five summers ago,

when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge

was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—

there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,

which you paid for with your last damn dime

because you once overheard me say that I liked it."

Matthew Olzmann

It's the little things. It's that you know the little things. It's that you see the little things. It's that even though the obvious things aren't what I imagined they would be - they're messy, they're complicated, they're hard. The little things are there, reminding me that the important things are in place. And that makes it easy.

Unsent 1/9/2020

The thing I feel most compelled to say is "I'm sorry," but I'm not exactly sure what I'm sorry for and I'm against empty apologies.

I'm writing this with the pencils you got me. What if these were the good luck charm on my LSAT? What if you were my good luck charm -- the sun always seems to find you, bad situations slide right off your back. "There was my jacket in the middle of the trail, untouched!" Your wallet waiting for you at Jay Peak, your parents overnighting your passport to you after your ID got buried in new snow at Kirkwood. I resented the magic that seemed to follow you around.

But maybe you were the magic. You and your clear attentive eyes, your easy smile, your hair that somehow looked more perfect the less you did to it. Why was that so hard for me to see?

I didn't (don't) believe in my own magic. "You have something special, You're different," you told me in November. Do you understand how badly I crave hearing that? How every overthinking, overanalyzing, overprotective part of me dreams that I'm special?

You do. It's so hard for me to fully understand, for some reason, that you know how badly I want that because that's what you want, too. I can't decide on my next sentence, so here are two choices:

a) I made you one-dimensional. I created a story of who you were in my head, and only added the evidence that fit my thesis.
b) I think too much about my own thinking. My meta-analysis skills are wonderful and horrible - I'm so busy swimming around in my own head that I shut reality out.

So I'll return to I'm sorry. I want there to be one moment that I could go back to and blame, but in reality there are millions. There are also millions on wonderful moments -- tender kisses, you carrying me to bed, loaded eye contact across the room, silly road trip dance parties, you squeezing my hand on chair lifts and ferris wheels, the perfect rhythm we always seemed to find in moments when the world around us was chaos.

Why can't there be a "right" answer? Why isn't there magic in this part of the story?

The Art of Resistance

"When you continue to be irritated by someone who refuses to change, you also refuse to change."

"Everyone is the protagonist in a saga of error, realization, and redemption: we're equal because God cares about how things turn out for each of us."

11:11 pt. III

"She told me she met the love of her life," Zohra says at last, still staring out the window. "You read poems about it, you hear stories about it, you hear Sicilians talk about being struck by lightning. We know there's no love of your life. Love isn't terrifying like that. It's walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it's doing taxes, it's cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It's having an ally in life. It's not fire, it's not lightning. It's what she always had with me. Isn't it? But what if she's right, Arthur? What if the Sicilians are right? That it's this earth-shattering thing she felt? Something I've never felt. Have you?"

Less begins to breath unevenly.

She turns to him: "What if one day you meet someone, Arthur, and it feels like it could never be anyone else? Not because other people are less attractive, or drink too much, or have issues in bed, or have to alphabetize every fucking book or organize the dishwasher in some way you just can't live with. It's because they aren't this person. This woman Janet met. Maybe you can go through your whole life and never meet them, and think love is all these other things, but if you do meet them, God help you! Because then: ka-blam! You're screwed. The way Janet is. She ruined our life for it! But what if that's real?"

---

"What is love Arthur? What is it?" she asks him. "Is it the good dear thing I had with Janet for eight years? Is it the good dear thing? Or is it the lightning bolt?"

---

"You want me to stay with you here forever?"

"Last Turn"

Is there a word for the feeling when you look back and you realize that things would have been so different if you were then who you are now? It's more complicated than regret - the heaviness and unfairness of regret is there, but it's balanced with joy that you came this far, and hope that things can only get better if you keep getting better. There's guilt, too - why didn't I figure this out before now? What pain could I have saved? And peace. Peace because I feel like I'm finally making it better.

"Mr Shaver had, in fact, been aware of the upcoming nuptials. The only note he left behind was inside a blue envelope addressed to Ms. Ryan and her husband and placed on the dining room table.

It offered no insight into the end of the Shavers' time together, only a simple wish from a man who had come to know what must be cherished.

'May you both have many years of happiness,' it read. 'May life be good to you.'"

11:11 pt. II

"In every relationship, there are request moments, which seem small (did you like my haircut? I rearranged the Tupperware drawer. This is your hair I cleaned out of the shower...) but are in face little moments of longing (do you desire me? do you appreciate me? do you care for me too?) They can be hard to see, or tiring to address, or even seem like nothing, but in the long run of love, leaning into rather than away from or not noticing, these request moments is essential. It's a brick by brick life of active attention: I hear you, I love you, I see you."

"Tell me, my love: Why did I have cancer three times? How did we have two children with autism? Why has nothing turned out as planned? Then again: How are your same 10 jokes still funny? Why does your morning coffee still taste the best? Why, after 22 years together, does my heart still flutter when you walk in the room? How did I get so lucky to have your love?"

"Here's the things about marriage. We commit to sticking together for richer or poorer, through sickness and health and during good times and bad, assuming that the tough times are the stress test. But what if it's the opposite? What if the hard times bring out our best and make us focus on what's important, while the danger zone is when we grow so complacent that we can afford to obsess over a neglected shirt for eight months?"

"Love is honoring another person as their own whole being and not projecting your need to fix/save/rescue onto them. [...] Love is knowing it isn't a fairy tale, a happy ending, or a romance novel."

"Write letters. Be honest in them. We write every time we are apart, and a few times a month when we are together. As an older ranger told me before my wedding, 'start every day saying I love you, then spend the rest of the day trying to prove it.'"