The magnitude of history

It’s my usual Sunday night, me rummaging through notes and notebooks, editing and writing. I stood up and went into my writing closet. Realizing that the binder I wanted was at the very top, I stood on a stool and yanked at the bottom of the stack. Swiftly it all came toppling over me, hitting me in the head in the process. Papers and folders scattered everywhere.

I grunted. I began picking them up one by one when I ran across a manila folder gently titled “WEDDING” in block letters, with a red heart sticker following the word. I’d forgotten I was planning a wedding. I slid slowly to the floor till I was sitting and I began to go through its contents.

There were lists of first dance songs and father/daughter songs; clippings of flower arrangements, swatches of fabrics, notebook entries of budgets, and location listings. There it all was. Very detailed and organized. All I ever dreamed of, all I thought I ever wanted. And on the last page, on the back cover of the folder, a pasted picture of me and him. I ran my finger across his face and it took my breath away. Your past is always your past. Even if you forget it, it remembers you.

It didn’t make me exceptionally sad. It didn’t make me miss him. It just made me painfully aware of the magnitude of the history. One that by placing on a top shelf, in the back of a closet, I had hoped to forget. Except I couldn’t forget, I couldn’t even move on from it without first acknowledging its presence.

The truth is I’d tried. I followed the ill-advised sentiment of the Mexican saying that goes “un clavo, saca otro clavo”. This to say, that it is the belief that to get over someone or to forget someone you have to simply fall in love again. That another nail will drive out the already preexisting nail. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t fall in love. Instead I butchered the attempt because I simply hadn’t correctly healed, nor had the correct amount of closure. In order to give your heart away you have to have one to begin with. And mine, well mine had simply gone.

It’s true. You don’t always get the perfect moment of closure. Sometimes you just have to do the best you can under the circumstances. And till that moment, I thought I had. Except my past still held chain and shackle over my heart. And I didn’t know how to break free from its grip. And all my best intentions kept making an even bigger mess of things. Because that is what happens when you try to run from the past. It doesn’t just catch up, no. It overtakes. Blotting out the future. The landscape. The very sky. Until there is no path left except that which leads you through it. The only one that can ever get you home.

They say that if you don’t pay attention to the past you’ll never understand the future. In my big attempt to let things go and put things behind me, I had managed to miss the biggest lesson. That it had happened it all. Despite our differences, we did have history. No one understood where I was coming from the way he did. I’m not sorry that it’s over but I am sorry for the way we let it end.

The night that we broke up was the last time I ever saw him again. It’s been over a year, and it is still hard to comprehend that a person that was such a big part of my life for so long is gone. Ultimately forever. Sure, I tried finding closure in some way. I wrote countless letters I never mailed. It’s like that song by Carrie Underwood says I said all I had to say in letters that I threw away. I picked up the phone a thousand times and tried dialing his number a thousand more. But each time the words fell short. It’d been so long and it wasn’t easy. It was literally like trying to spin the world the other way…

Our ending had been so messy, so excruciatingly painful that I wanted to make-believe we’d never happened. Except we had. And with the downfall of our relationship, a 10 year friendship was swept away. But I didn’t acknowledge that, not even a little bit. That this person, this lifelong, way before he was my boyfriend, friend was gone. That it was agonizing. That it wasn’t right, and would never be right. Pretending that his taillights in the rain where the last remanence of him wasn’t helping anyone. No, not even myself.

I held the folder close to my chest and began to feel out of breath. I laid back and closed my eyes, pressing my cheek to the floor and waited. What for? I don’t know. To be rescued or found. But no one came. There is something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to keep looking back. Except I had to. I had to retrace my steps and take down notes, and paste lost and found notices to find the heart that vanished.

You can’t just turn your heart off like you do a faucet. You have to go to the source and dry it out, drop by drop. I knew it would take me time to get my heart functioning again. That falling in love again wasn’t even the end game. That it was about me just being okay, content, and serene. I didn’t know what that looked like but I had a feeling it wasn’t lying on the floor reminiscing about the regrets for the choices I’d made. It was out there, where stories broke free from its pages that eventually I would find myself again…

And so it is.

Growing up when people asked me what I feared the most I had only one answer. Most people would say spiders, or insects, big dogs, or even heights. Those are usual fears and it’s even true that they were some of mine. But quite frankly even at a young age I knew what I feared the most. Regret.

Regret is a peculiar thing. More often than not, in the moment, we don’t know if we will face it as part of the outcome for our actions. We direly hope that the doors that we close, and the paths that we choose are inevitably leading us down our very own yellow brick road to blissfulness. Regret, like hindsight, is 20/20. The truth is that none of us are perfect. That we won’t always make the right decisions. That sometimes we will do what we can with what we have. And that inevitably we will face that life has a way of disregarding even our best intentions.

A couple of weeks ago my first love got married. I met the news with so many mixed emotions. A downpour of thoughts crossed my mind, along with a thousand what ifs. All truly unwelcome and surprising as this person hasn’t been a part of my life in a very, very long time. What I failed to comprehend was pointed out by a dear friend. “You’re not crying because you are still in love with him. You aren’t crying because you have lost him forever. And you aren’t even crying because you miss him. You are crying because you regret the outcome. Because the news makes you take inventory of your own current status and you realize that you aren’t happy with where you are in life. So nostalgia blinds you and makes you wonder if it could have been different. You are sad because you wish, not for him to be your happy ending, but because you wish you had one at all.”

I looked at her in disbelief. In a few sentences she seemed to narrow down to the source of it all. And it was completely true. Certain events do make us take inventory of our lives. They make you ask yourself where you are in your own story. They make you look around you and pinpoint exactly what is missing. And since we only have our own recollection of experience, nostalgia hits, showing you images of the moments when you did have what is now gone, making tears escape violently.

It so very easy to misinterpret these as real, tangible, feelings that profess love. The truth is I’m not still in love with him. I don’t even know him anymore. All I have is a collection of sweet reverie memories. Life through rose colored, first love, everything is beautiful, glasses. He isn’t the boy who kept me from falling anymore, and I’m not the naïve, inexperienced child he once knew. Even in alternate universes our story had an ending.

But what was true, was that it made me face regret. To look at the path that I took since him, the long sometimes thorn covered, dark winding roads, and the detours that mislead me. To now. This place. I’m no better off today than the last time he said goodbye to me. And that hurts. Because I’ve made so many poor choices when it comes to relationships. Because I’ve looked near and far and have yet to find where I belong. Because in the grand scheme of things I came out with the short end of the stick.

SD once wrote: “So many times it seemed like there were chances to stop things before they started. Or even stop them in midstream. But it was even worse when you knew in that very moment that there was still time to save yourself, and yet you wouldn't even budge.” I’ve spent a lifetime not budging, and then flinching at the inescapable cost thereafter. And that’s not anyone else’s fault but all my own.

If regrets are repentance for an action taken, especially for consequences that you knew you could of easily avoided, mines are as deep as the ocean blue. Unavoidably we become the people we said we would never become.

I think back to a sun dress wearing, brown hair, hazel eyes, freckled face kid. And everything she feared she’d become, she now is. And that… that’s what I regret the most.

Sometimes the truth weighs heavier

It was a late afternoon when she received a text from one of her best friends to meet up for dinner. It’d been a long day at work. And she needed a bit of distracting. So they met up for sushi. The waitress had just finished handing them their menu’s when her phone rang and her other best friend was on the other line. She smiled and said “Oh look who it is” showing the phone to her friend across the table.

“Hello Sunshine!” She said in her usual cheery voice.

What followed were a multitude of pleasantries, and there was an eerie sense of worry that came over her. She knew in her heart that, that conversation had much more to do with something important than what the weather was this time a year. She could hear the nervousness in her friend’s voice so she finally said

 “So what’s up? What can I help you with?”

“Well, I don’t know how to say this.”

And her heart sank

“Well just say it.” She squirmed in her chair.

“I received an invitation in the mail.”

“And?” She still couldn’t put things together

“He’s getting married.”

“Oh, god” she gasped.

That moment felt like being at the end of a mountain when the snow separates from the ice caps, and an avalanche rushes down. And you gulp and close your eyes like if that will be enough to help you escape its wrath.

That moment felt like being in the middle of a frozen lake skating and feeling carefree. Till the ice beneath you cracks, and gives, and the freezing waters begin to devour you. And you throw your hands up in the air. Like if reaching for the surface will keep you from drowning.

That moment felt like being in the middle of a concrete city surrounded by buildings when a magnitude earthquake hits and the walls start to cave in. And no matter what you do you can’t weave fast enough before another wall comes crashing down. And you flail your limbs as though it will be enough to stop the earth from swallowing you whole.

Her friend continued on and she asked a flurry of questions. Who was she? Had they dated a long time? Why hadn’t she ever seen her? Had he loved her long? A thousand questions to make sense of one undeniable truth. He wasn’t hers to keep anymore.

Her friends did their best to comfort her. The one on the phone lived in another state and could not be there physically so she arranged with the other to tell her this way. So she wouldn’t be alone. So she’d have someone to shed the tears with. Once she was done asking a million questions she got off the phone and the tears began.

She did her best to wipe them but every time she did another quickly followed. It was a type of sadness unimagined. A thousand emotions came to surface. So many she’d tried for years to suffocate.

Their love had been the kind of love that stays with you a lifetime. He was the boy that taught her what love was. She was the girl who brought him joy beyond compare. And though that love was young, it was pure. It was everlasting. They grew in years together. But she was broken. And he could never see that. He so direly believed in her that he didn’t see her jagged edges. He saw so much potential in her and that was enough for him to keep on loving her through many years. But the brokenness in her made her push him away time and time again.

The years went on, and their unwavering love caved inevitably. She loved him so much she couldn’t drag him down with her. He never understood that sacrifice. So she did her best to move on, dated, and in crowds of men she searched for his face. In hearts of others she called his name. And after every breakup she suffered, her heart longed even more for him. But it was too long, too late, too wrong.

6 years passed and she saw him rare and few. She heard of no other in his life, so to hear that he was now getting married not only shook her, it left her breathless.

“It’s the end of an era” she said to her friend

“Yes, it really, really is.”

She began explaining things to her best friend as if she didn’t already know.

“I never wanted to hurt him. I just wanted to save him from myself.”

“I know.”

“It’s silly isn’t it? To cry over someone who hasn’t been a part of your life in so long? I have no right to be such a mess.”

“NO, it’s not silly. It is normal. It is expected, believe me I know.” And she did know. It’d happen to her too. “Everyone’s favorite unrequited love story is really over. It really is the end of an era. Not only for you, but for so many others as well. It is sad, it is heart wrenching sad. And you have every right to cry over it.”

So she did, as quietly as she could in the middle of an uptown sushi place. Surrounded by people and lovers, and stories that were beginning. As hers was direly ending.

Dinner was over and she walked to her car. She barely made it inside when the weeping broke through. Like a dam that gives, obliterating everything in its path. She went home and pulled from the back of her closet a box she kept well hidden. Every physical part she had left of him was in that box. Pictures, and CD’s he burned for her, stuffed animals, a collection of snow globes from every city he went to, a music box with two little porcelain Chihuahua’s inside. T-shirts, and hats, and post cards, letters and cards. And in one wooden box, two wilting roses. The first he ever gave her.

And with every object, a memory appeared. And the memorabilia of their love story played their silent movie in her mind and heart, as she cried uncontrollably.

She crawled into bed that night and put Michael Buble’s song “You were always on my mind” on a loop. She laid back and faced the empty side of the bed and she wrapped her arms around his absence one very last time.

Sometimes the truth weighs heavier than all the castles you painted, than all the dreams you created, than all the endings you thought were fated.

Great Expectations

When I was about 12 or so, a sneaker company came out with these skating-tennis shoes. Just regular tennis shoes that could turn into skates. They became the rage at the school I went to. And everyone who was anyone had a pair. 

So I of course, begged and begged till I got my pair. They weren't easily given. I had to pick up extra chores, be extra sweet, be super obedient, and look at my dad with puppy eyes many, many times before he even considered getting them for me.  Needless to say that by the time I got them, I was ecstatic; happy that I now too possessed the biggest fashion trend at school.

When the first day of school came after I bought them, I was so blissful, I planned my entrance and a whole outfit around them. That day I got to school, I walked into the cafeteria beaming. But as I prepared to show them off, only one worked. So there I was skidding to a complete stop, quite abruptly, right in front of another kid who had his tray in his hand. I plowed right into him sending his tray straight in the air. I gasped knowing that what goes up must come down. And it did. Right on top of me. A tray full of oatmeal pancakes and gooey syrup toppled on top of me.

Needless to say I was mortified! To make things worse. There was a staff meeting later that week and the shoes were banned from school. So the big investment my parents made in the shoes went to the back of my closet where they were never worn again.

They say the bigger the expectation the bigger the heartache. We paint castles in skies, fold wishes into pockets, and tuck dreams into hearts. We build up the hype in our heads up so high that it’s hard to swallow the pill of reality. That some things just never work out the way we’d want them to.

Maybe you put all your eggs in one basket. Maybe you trusted or gave far more of yourself in a friendship and came out empty handed. Maybe the relationship you were in didn't pan out the way you thought it would. We do it all the time. We gamble more than we can afford to lose. But even if that’s the case, who’s to say it’s completely a bad thing?

I agree, there’s no getting around the gradations of grief you go through when facing a loss. Of course it’s disappointing. But people recover from disappointment; otherwise we’d all be hanging from nooses.

There’s something to say about the fearless optimism of a child. I find more and more, not only with myself, but those around me that as we age it is sadly a dwindling trait. It’s by far more easy to be a Cynic. But Cynicism isn't a safety net, it’s a crutch!

A way to rationalize with ourselves why we can’t, why we won’t, take chances. Not to say that yours isn't valid, just simply that it is a corrosive way of thinking. You’re not putting the world at bay. You’re fencing yourself in. You’re narrowing your perception. You’re, frankly, giving up on yourself.

Not every endeavor leads to a tray of heaping, dripping food upon your body. Not every venture ends up in a total messy disaster. And though going in you’re never sure of that, you've got to try. Because what defines you isn't how many times you crashed, but the number of times you got back up. As long as it’s one more; you’re all good. J

The dead of winter, the light in spring

I drove home in a gray afternoon. It’d been a long day at work, the kind that keeps you so busy that you haven’t a minute to think about a single thing. Frantic, with deadlines, and people pulling you a million directions. Needless to say I was drained, and utterly exhausted.

I pulled up to the driveway, and shut the car off. As much as I wanted warmth, I didn’t hurriedly dash for the front door. Instead, I looked out of my passenger window and saw my dad gardening in the front yard. It was his favorite thing to do. And he was so good at it. His green thumb made everything flourish in effortless beauty. I loved that about him.

I hadn’t noticed how depressing our yard looked. This winter had been so bitterly cold it had taken hostage most of the plants. But brown and wilting as they were, my dad kneeled beside them adding fertilizer and water. He was also attaching pieces of tarp to his beloved rose bushes, shielding them from the winter frost. I thought it was monotonous, but he kept on, paying no mind to the bone-chilling wind and the 32 degree weather that afternoon. After all it was his garden, and if he didn’t do it no one else would.

I went inside swiftly only yelling out a “hi dad” before shutting the front door close. I went directly to my room, threw my things on a chair, sat on the corner of my bed, and laid back head first. I closed my eyes. Thoughts were swirling in my head. But all I could keep thinking about was how reminiscent of those rose bushes I felt. Long gone the green of the stem and the blooming buds. Instead, they lied crippled, brown, and wilted.

A break up and the end of an era had casted a winter filled with shadows and uncertainty. I couldn’t stop the process much less a rose could stop winter from rolling through. But though accepted and having had closure, my inner self couldn’t but help remain lifeless and wilted. I’d lost my bloom, and at that moment hadn’t the slightest idea of how to recover.

Some things seem menial, as if the task surpasses the ending result in strength and time, and therefore seems wasteful. But they are nonetheless necessary. Some things seem so uncertain, that all hope attached to it seems foolish and imprudent. For the person outside looking in, a brown, wilted rose bush is just that. Wilted. They’d never experienced its spring… when the bloom of the flower made a garden luscious, beaming and radiant.

And yet when March crept up from behind the long buried shadows, and the garden stretched out its arms after its deep slumber, the onlooker would welcome it with joy. Forgotten was the arduous task of keeping alive its roots so that it would bloom again in spring. To the gardener the end result of a tedious winter was worth it. Where someone saw a dead garden, he saw soil, and seed, and life.

I think we too often forget that. In the, at times, excruciating task of mending our hearts we burry our heads so deep into our despair and sorrow that we forget that. Our hearts and our strength seem so shattered they haze our view. And everything seems yellowing, browning, withered.  But in truth, with a little work, and a lot of hope, even the bleakest garden can bloom again. After all isn’t the definition of faith “the evident demonstration of realities that are not seen”?

I lied in bed looking up at my ceiling, 30 minutes had gone by. I stood up and went to my window, and there was my dad still working in the garden. I went into the kitchen and poured him a hot cup of coffee and myself a hot tea. I put on my coat and walked outside to give it to him. I asked him what he was doing, he looked up at me and smiled and he began explaining to me the technicalities. And even though I couldn’t begin to grasp the concept, I nodded.  

Because truth is… in the dead of winter we all need a little nurturing, a little warmth, or even just a hot cup of coffee to keep us going. 

Let it hurt

7:01 in the evening. It’d been one of those days. Those terrible days where it seems like the whole worlds against you and you’re only holding on by a thread. My body ached from head to toe. My mind numb from all the inflicting thoughts that lay in it. My head throbbed as my pounding heart beat unnaturally.

I came home to find the house completely still and empty. I looked into the kitchen, a plate labeled “Dinner” Had been left out on the countertop. And a “PS” added “wash the dish afterwards.” As if I needed reminding. But I wasn’t hungry. So I grabbed the dish and put it in the fridge. Pulled out a bottle of red wine. The one we’d got from the vineyard months ago. After pouring myself a glass, I went into the bathroom. I took out every candle we owned and light them up. I went into the hall and put on an old record. Mile Davis. The melody soothing and calming.

I turned on the hot water. And poured a whole bottle of bath bubbles. I got undressed. And I stepped into the bath. I needed this. I said to myself. I slid slowly down into the water till I was completely underwater. That’s what I wanted to do most of all. That’s what I really needed, to disappear. Deep down into the water till every last bubble of oxygen was gone. Maybe then I’d forget.

All I’d ever wanted was to forget. But even when I thought I had, pieces kept emerging. Like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below.

And a shipwreck I was. There on a Monday night while the world kept on turning, I submerged my aching body into the deep end of the water. Hoping to stop the pieces that kept emerging from making a whole.

I came up from the water covered in tears. And it hurt. I didn’t mean to fall apart; I didn’t mean to start sobbing, or for my rickety body to tremble from head to toe. But the truth is that, sometimes, the things that we don’t want to happen are exactly the things that we NEED most to take place. And more than a fake smile, a numb spirit, I needed to unravel. Putting off the pain only works for so long. Eventually you’ll walk right into a mirror that will stop you dead on your tracks and make realize you are aching. And the only way around it is to let healing do its work and let it hurt.

We falsely correlate tears with weakness. Admittance of being inflicted is casted as being over emotional. We’d rather mask the surface; put another board over the cracked bottom of our boats, than declare a shipwreck. And we fool ourselves into believing that it works. Until the water seeps in from tiny little cracks you never even noticed where there. Till you’re sinking once more.

Allowing yourself to heal properly is as vital as having a floating device, or a life boat on board. It’s the only thing that will bring you back to shore. That’s not to say that it’s easy or in any way graceful, but it’s necessary. It’s an imperative part of the process.

Its 7:59 in the evening now, the sun has set, and the candles are burning low. Miles Davis is playing on the old record player in the hall. And for the first time in days I am serene. I am at peace. I am at shore.