I have spent the last three decades alternately seeking out and attempting to heal from an early love. The one. For most of this time, I carried around a sense that I had missed my chance and I came to believe that closing doors and locking windows was better than facing a reality in which I was one of the many walking wounded with a gaping hole where my heart should have been.
So, I cleaned up, shaped up, and showed up. Being a consummate chameleon, I convinced everyone, including myself that I was fine, great even. I went to therapy, joined a group, made many, many friends, gardened as if my life depended on it, and became okay. My garden flourished and I thought I flourished too. I did flourish, in fact. I learned I could be okay with me. Just me. Alone. The mere word used to strike terror in my heart, a cold prickly heat sneaking up my spine. Alone. No punishment was greater than to be shut out or left in stunned silence. I’d experienced both of these in the course of my multiple attempts at a relationship with the one. But this time, I made friends with alone. I embraced it. I welcomed it into my home and served it tea with honey. I became comfortable being single without shame or apology. Alone.
There is a scene in the movie, Eat, Pray, Love in which the actress playing Elizabeth Gilbert is sitting in a claw foot bathtub in Italy learning Italian. She reads the phrase, sono sola, I am alone.
I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone.
The thing is, alone was okay. Alone was completely okay until it wasn’t. Ultimately, I missed some aspects of being with someone. I missed companionship. I missed conversations with one who knew me well. I missed being seen in the Avatar definition of being seen. I also missed sex and in seeking and finding sex, I convinced myself I saw something which wasn’t even there. In finding sex, I deluded myself I’d found companionship, knowing, and visibility. I also persuaded myself that it was enough. Knowing what I know today, however it is clear I was asleep at the wheel.
Life changed dramatically and the relationship which never should have been a relationship ended. In the end, this was a fortunate turn of events during a very unfortunate time. I settled in for what I envisioned would be another long if not lifelong time of solitude, at least as far as affairs of my heart.
As often happens, life had other plans. You.
You came in when I didn’t even know I was sleeping. You came in when I was clean. I had done the work and purged myself of the one. Through blood, sweat, and tears, I had swept her out of my life and cleared my heart. I’d like to say that time had a hand in this as well, but if a quarter of a century hadn’t expunged her from my heart before, another few years wouldn’t do it either. It was work. I worked. It worked. I was alone at exactly the time and in exactly the way I needed to be. Sono sola.
Since then, I have come to believe that there can be many ‘ones’ and our love is not diluted by deeply loving more than one person in a lifetime. This is a good revelation because I am, if nothing else, a romantic at heart and I would like to love deeply again.
You came in when I didn’t even know I was sleeping. You came in when I was clean. You came in without the burden of an unspoken, but ever-present, competition with the one. You came in unencumbered by my ghosts of relationships past. You came in, flipped a switch, and made me realize I had been sitting in the dark. You came in, put your mouth to mine and gave me a life-saving breath. You came in and I was fully awakened. The doors were wrenched off their hinges, the windows flew open, and suddenly there was plenty of air to breathe. And so...
I breathe.
~ Mk Michaels
