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."