a long way home

I have never known love unbound by time and space and condition.

A little over a year ago, I poured myself a bath. A heavy-handed concoction of salts and potions mixed pungently with my inexpert longing. A bergamot candle sent wild shadows flickering ominously in the cavernous space. And, like the sending up of a prayer, I tapped play on a set of melancholy tunes hand-selected for this particular ritual before presenting myself, bare and pleading, before the water.

Oh, won’t you please…

Swallow me whole.

Scrub me raw.

& Spit me out anew.

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And floating softly against the acrylic and fiberglass floor of my tub, I met my reckoning. It flooded me like a tsunami, a swift and otherworldly force raging, burning, then scalding my every cell. Until I emerged a skeleton, a lowly rock affixed to the bottom, faceless, nameless, and surreal.

It was a long time coming; this total undoing of the self. My form, a shell, plucked from its place by the sea in covet by one too many eager collectors. They could not let my beauty lie and admire it in awe as the moment it was and should have forever stayed.

Each beginning, a relishment, a burst of ego, a prize.

Each ending, a dusty shelf, a vacant stare, an unapologetic discard.

My beauty unchanging, but to the eye of my beholder – my thief & my appraiser.

For what then, is beauty, that goes forever unseen?

My bones clacked as I slid across the wet tile, propelled towards the door, the handle, its teasing glare in the light. My frictionless hands fumbling for release. And I stepped out, more naked than ever before, and bore my frail self to R, my then-fiancé (now husband).

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I have never known love unbound by time and space and condition.

I know this now, and maybe I did then, too, subconsciously recognize its absence as a source of my undoing. But even as recently as a year ago, I believed I’d found it so many years before in my barely post-adolescent (and first/only) relationship.

We were flawed kids then. Trauma-ridden in ways we still, to this day, do not fully understand about ourselves or each other.

From the start, we were fraught by insecurity and a reluctance to trust that plagued our war-torn hearts. We were the first and only loves that either of us had known, and they fed our hopes and our souls so potently we were overwhelmed. The happiest we had ever felt, and surely still a living and breathing manifestation of what we both could only assume would someday leave us.

It was an agony that they say is the compromise you make to be loved, and I believed it. One day we were there, talking endlessly until 5 in the morning, and the next there was strain and silence and the unmistakable undercurrent of fear.

We were not yet 1 month into dating when I started to google how do you know when you’re in love and was left unsatisfied by the answers available to me on this blog or that clickbait site. What did I know of love? What claim did I have to it? So soon, and yet, so sure.

But the day I worked up the courage a month later to tell R how I felt, that I thought I was falling in love with him, he stiffened at my side. Panic surged, thickening the air between our bodies as we lay on my childhood bed staring at the ceiling, in contemplation... or maybe in unacknowledgable terror.

He didn’t answer, and somewhere deep within, a familiar sadness set in, mingled unceremoniously with resignation and certainty of my unlovability. A good kisser, sure. But a lover for whom to bear your soul to, as I had so longed for, never. I drove him home in silence; seated beside me yet miles away somewhere deep beneath his sun-flecked brunette curls and pale blue eyes, somewhere I had never been to. Somewhere that maybe to this day, I still have never known.

He mumbled a slurred iloveyoutoo as he ran from my car. And I didn’t hear from him again for two weeks.

At 18 years old, we forgive such behavior. Sense is rankled by hormones and a solid lack of perspective. We were fine for a few weeks before a new challenge rocked our relationship, and we were plunged into the plight of long-distance lovers. In this, we lasted about 1 tumultuous month before R bowed out in a vague and unapologetic call that tore my heart in two. And there it sat, in a pile of empty bottles and unwashed laundry in the corner of my dorm room floor.

I dusted it off right before the holiday break of my freshman year, determined to forge it together again. I couldn’t let a 4-month relationship ruin my life after all. But then I found myself, again standing there in his kitchen like that very first day, his startled face and unsuspecting smile at the sight of me. And we were back the very next day.

There is a push and a pull in love. Especially young love. Each person coming into their own awkwardly and uncertainly following extended time in the ever murky waters of adolescence. I thought I understood this: a sacrifice of long distance, a sacrifice of dating my former best friend's older brother, a sacrifice to make to be loved. There had always been conditions; I was good at spotting them and my ego thrived on meeting them. But with R, I have never understood the conditions; try as I might, his love has always taunted me like a moving target.

One day I am perfect, his soulmate, simple and as I am. The next, I am trying to tear us apart. And truth be told, I’ve fallen on this sword of his a thousand times in 10 years, stepping on land mines I never suspected awaited my stumbling feet.

Sometimes there is pity when I fall. And sometimes, a snide remark or an I told you so. And I, ever the perfect eldest daughter, born amongst the landmines, was determined to prove I could learn again to dance among them.

And so I did. And so we evolved.

I moved us many times. Convinced that this place or that would heal us. I went to therapy, did the work, pointed fingers at my parents, took over responsibility in our home for finances and purpose. I worked 3 jobs, I found us friends, I contorted, I shrunk.

And R lived on. Sometimes adoring me and showering me with love and gifts and praise, and other times aggressive and reclusive. Every whim of defiance became mine to carry, mine to fix, and often even somehow, me to blame.

I never questioned all of the ways he made me wrong. My anxious mind raced on for solutions, for a fix, for proof that not all was lost.

We all seek subconsciously to repeat the patterns that plagued our youth. For the feelings they arise in us are familiar, deserved even. And R and I are that for each other on a silver platter lined with rose petals. For every way my caregivers picked at me and provoked me, his ignored and resented him. For every way my childhood demanded perfection as a means of avoiding someone else’s anger, his demanded silence and conformity.

And the funny thing is, we didn’t even know one another on those first dates. We had no way of seeing these things behind the shy smiles and tentative touches. Yet what a match we have made in feeding and fueling, in pushing and pulling, on the broken pieces of each other.

There is a term for this, of course, that I am armed with now. Something we both grew up as victims of and now have fallen comfortably into, even asked for. Like welcoming an old friend into the home you diligently arranged just for them. Their approval and acceptance, though they have not known you all this time.

We live by the melody of our own destruction, and sing in harmony its every verse. A lullaby of reassurance… to tell each other in a language we’ll always understand:

I’m still here.

R and I love each other, and it’s not an excuse. I am far too self-aware these days for that. There has always been a profound love, quieter than the apologies and the grand gestures befitting of our bad habits. There is a fundamental, if broken, goodness we share. I’d like to think that is what we recognized in one another in those early days and in many, many days since. I have known the intent to harm and control; I have seen it work its insidious and inescapable magic on the psyche. Our love is not that. But our trauma understands only that. And so it’s hard to trust the other kind of love, when the only indicator of its continued presence comes one second, one hour, and one day at a time. We never do know what tomorrow will hold.

So it’s in that space that we live, the chaotic unknown between love and loss. Between hope and fear. Between intent and action. Between faith and proof.

And all of our moving, for a time, gave meaning to that space; if I could just keep us perpetually between coming and going, I never had to recognize that we long ago settled in a broken home.

Wherever you go, there you are.

Thus, after my final attempt to bring us back to a place we’ve never actually been – a ring on my finger and a hole in my heart – I took a bath.

And my shadow rose from the water. Its form, a hollow cavity, carved into again and again by those who did not know how to love. And even by I, who was never taught to be loved.

I stood before my husband-to-be with nothing left.

I wept at his feet and asked him to see me as I was.

Do you love me still?

And he answered,

yes.

But now I wonder

if he knew then what I know now…

It’s been a year. Since the bath.

I see now that it gave me what I wished it to; it scrubbed me raw.

Shedding off the layers of pretense, the mold cast for someone else’s eyes, the plea, and even the weed-strewn wall around my fragile heart.

It spit me out so new that I recoiled from the light and cried for the arms of my mother and longed to be fed and held while I looked around for the very first time at all this life has to offer me.

The growing was fast and furious and wild and freeing.

And now there is joy. So much joy.

And there is also pain. So much pain.

And I can hold both in the same hand, and gaze upon them with clear eyes, and love them each with such tenderness that it now seems absurd to wait for another person to love me as only I can love myself.

As for R and I.

Maybe I will never know an unconditional love.

Never receive an I love you without that pesky asterisk affixed to the sentiment.

Maybe such a thing doesn’t exist. Because all things good in life demand equal parts of sacrifice and suffering.

Maybe balance is the best we can hope for?

Maybe grace, time, and boundaries can save us?

Maybe pain, grief, and fear will part us?

The only certainty is that there is no certainty.

Only choices and their irrevocable and unforseeable consequences.

anyway, here it is…

-June

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