The promise of solitude

"The heart will break, but broken live on." 

Lord Byron

This piece has been the victim of some serious cut and paste, editing, reshuffling, and putting back together. I started it a few weeks ago when I first came home at a pivotal moment. A moment marked by endings and the uncertainty of the future, not sure about what my professional career had in store for me, a relationship of two years had had its definite end, and for the first time in my life I didn't have another one lined up, I had the opportunity to come back and give myself a chance to exist in the freedom of the uncertain.

Like in most writing, at least my own, love and relationships play a central role, especially when love means heartache. Somehow in letting the ink flow the pain dissipates, I use to cut myself to release the pain, seeing the blood made me feel lighter, the red , the line of the wound symbolised the end of the pain. With time, age, growth, self discovery I realised that blood wasn't the key to stabilising those powerful emotions: pain, rage, depression; it was another kind of bleeding: words. What I discovered was magical, words had the power to conjure up a sense of peace I could not find elsewhere, a detachment that provided a space to truly reflect.

That is why during this period writing has been the one constant. Since I landed two months ago I haven't unpacked, I have been staying in four different places, I have been feeling a bit out of place, but my home, my writing has kept me warm and focused. At the different stages of worry and grief, happiness and elation, self-discovery and growth, it has provided me with a space to speak and listen. It is for this reason that this piece is so anachronistic, messy, disjointed. at parts the one writing is the woman with a bruised heart, at others the worried daughter, but always me.

At one point I sat on a window ledge 10 floors up staring at the ground below, the sky had that after rain glow and the air was fresh. It had poured before, the thunder so loud, the lightening so bright, I had spent the day resting watching the hours go by thinking of us, of him and of how my love had finally ran out. He made so many holes in my heart that it was inevitable that it would eventually find its way out. It came suddenly, I wasn't expecting it to happen for a while yet, I thought I would be mourning its lost for a long time still, that there were many more tears to shed.But the mask fell from my eyes and I saw who we were for the first time, and who I had become by his side.The moment I was expecting came sooner, and I was suddenly over the hill and over him.

When you are right in the thick of it you can't see a way out, an alternative. Life can only be the way you had imagined it, clawing your way out of the impossible, fingers bleeding, exhausted. Days, months, even years pass and the blindfold remains. And then it falls and everything is clear, I am a star, never a satellite.I had tried so hard to become a reflection, to conceal my weaknesses, my insecurities. He arrived into my life like a bullet and shot me mid-flight and until the point I hit the ground I still believed I was flying. Unaware of the fast approaching ground, I continued dancing with the wrong side of the mirror in front of me, convinced it was him. Gravity won in the end and I came face to face with the ground. Sparks flew everywhere, the shell I was hiding behind shattered.

In the simple solitude of an empty bed I have found answers to unwanted questions, remembering what it was like to just dance, to just kiss, to listen to honest replies from those who truly love me, to sleep next to my mother to give her comfort while she recovers, to share a bed with my sisters, my niece, and my dad and love it even though we are cramped together and little Luna stretches out and pushes everyone out of the bed. To meet friends from my childhood who recognise me at first sight and say I haven't changed a bit, that I am still the small child, smiling, ready for some crazy plan but with those big innocent eyes. Meeting a crush from when I was a teenager but with the confidence of a 30year old that can get away with all sorts of trouble. Rekindle my first big love, the one against which all measure up and in spite of the obvious disappointments that come with age, still get the million butterflies fluttering inside turning me into a silly teenager with big dreamy eyes.

The solitude of an empty bed is not only physical, it is also the solitude of the uncertain, of not knowing where I stand, where my mind truly is. And that is the freedom that has enabled me to live in the past and in the present at the same time, with an eye always firmly in the future. I can honestly say, there have been few times in my life I have been in such a good place, not because I have the supernatural and artificial strength of manic stages, I have a million doubts, I feel insecure, I am worried sick, I feel alone. But I also feel strong, it feels incredibly empowering to be single, really truly single.

It is important for me to return to the issue of love because even though the symbiotic relationship writing and heartache had for me, and how the interactions between the two helped me heal deep and painful wounds, learning to find inspiration in other parts of me an of my life is actually the most important aspect in this entire process.  I have, since I can remember, been a hopeless romantic. Everything seemed to revolve around love, men, relationships. That was my Achilles heel, love could make me or break me. I would sacrifice anything for it, foolishly, even my life.

A few months back when a relationship I thought was going to last forever ended and a life I had fabricated to the smallest detail collapsed,  I pretended I believed it was all over, but I was playing games. In my head it wasn't over, and I was prepared to do whatever it took to get back what I felt was mine. I put myself in vulnerable situations, I played with his heart, and with mine, I was cruel, and to be frank, stupid. I was prepared to be his ghost, just to be able to have even a fraction of what we use to have. I felt my insides wither as time went by, I was being eaten by uncertainty, I didn't know if what I was doing was for myself or for him anymore. As I grew stronger in other aspects of my life in those seven months, my heart had become an appendix to his. When the inevitable severing of the cord uniting me to him was done I wasn't expecting to feel so free, so happy, but I was.

Being empowered by not having to define myself by outcomes that depend on someone else's actions has given me a space to move and breathe. There is a lot more room left inside of me now that I am no longer obsessed with our future, at least the one I had imagined. Even more liberating is the union of the fragmented pieces scattered by accumulated pain, pain I had refused to resolve because I was scared to look at the facts. I have been judged harshly by those around me, but at the end of the day those judgments are not the ones that count. I have learnt that more often that not in judging others we are in fact coming face to face with aspects of ourselves that we do not want to see. For this reason I respect the criticism that comes my way, it bears some truth, truths I have to address, and those who judge me are entitled to do so. 

However, the real criticism, the one I couldn't look at in the mirror, was the one coming from within. Within, now, there is more than enough room to contemplate how to deal with it. Over the following weeks I will be exploring those aspects. Of course, it is not a list that one day will end and then suddenly I will be perfect, ha, as if! More and more will emerge as time goes by, and this is the space where I seek to resolve and unknot the mess that my mind sometimes makes out of it. Not sure who reads it, or if it matters. What truly counts is that the putting it out there, my most intimate, painful, vulnerable selves is part of the process...at least my own.

Anew the long walk has began, with only the promise of the unexpected. The face of my new lover drifts in and out of my dreams never remaining long enough to be remembered, nothing does. That is the magic of this present, the magnitude of this freedom.