You came in clean

You came in when I didn’t even know I was sleeping.  Sure, I knew I’d shut parts of me down, closed doors, locked windows tight, but I thought I was whole enough.  I had managed to love again, or so I thought.  I’d moved on, found closure, and started anew.  Little did I know that my glass was half empty, my window shades half drawn allowing only a fraction of the sun’s light in, and I was merely going through the motions.  Experiencing and yet feeling nothing.

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

The New Normal

Nearly eighteen years ago, only a few days after my daughter was born, I remember thinking “It will be good when things get back to normal.”  This thought came to me in the midst of a deep, bone-wearied fatigue, mountains of laundry, constant diaper changes, and a nursing baby girl who was constantly hungry.  I was so tired at that time of my life that I would literally salivate when I saw the bed…as if a nap might assuage my exhaustion. 

The irony in all this is that ‘normal’ never returned, at least not in the way I had known normal before.  Sure, life got into a routine and that constantly hungry baby, grew into a constantly moving toddler, but the quiet normal of a life without children never returned.  By the time my son came along, I knew better than to expect normal to return again.  Interestingly, it was so much easier to integrate my second child into my life than my first.  I suppose my expectations were lower.  Perhaps my son was an easier child.  More likely, I had learned that the house could be a little less tidy, and the laundry didn’t have to be perfectly folded.  In any case, another new normal came along and life was good.

Life has brought with it a never-ending series of changes over the years; the kids grew from babies to toddlers to elementary students to pre-teens to teenagers, my partner and I separated, we each dated others and those relationships started and ended and started again, the world around us changed, and most unfathomably, my ex-partner, Amy, died suddenly in October.

Just the other day, I found myself, once again, thinking about life getting back to normal.  In a misguided moment, I even found myself looking toward life ‘getting back to normal.’.  The past six months have been hectic, emotional, and bone-wearyingly exhausting.  It seems that the slow motion of the first few weeks after Amy’s death quickly shifted to life at a frantic pace.  Work seemed to intensify, the kids’ needs amplified, the addition of Amy’s two animals into our household increased the animal care responsibilities tenfold, and now I share my home with my children full-time vs. the former shared custody arrangement.  I find myself constantly tired, and yet unable to make time and space to actually rest.  It has occurred to me that I might be manufacturing reasons to stay busy so I didn’t have to hold still and think about our loss.  I have come to the conclusion that this is only partially true.  Certainly, the anesthesia of being busy is helpful at times, but it isn’t everything that keeps life moving at the speed of light.  The speed of life?  Yes, that’s it.

So, as I anticipated life getting back to normal the other day, I also had a parallel thought.  It occurred to me that life may simply be a series of reaching milestones, traumas, events, and occurrences which so dramatically change the dynamic of our world that our prior ‘normal’ can no longer exist and the normalcy of our life transforms into a new normal.  The new normal ~ get used to it.  Don’t get too comfortable with it though, because as surely as you get comfortable, something else will come along and change everything once again. 

~ Mk Michaels

Rest

“Sleep,” she said, “I’ll watch the cave door

so you can rest the whole night through.”

Completely spent with no reserve left, I had no choice

but to lay my weary head on her shoulder

and trust all would be well.

The night came and went.

the sun rose in the East and

I came through the night unscathed.

My head still on her shoulder,

I stretched along her length and

inhaled her warm scent, familiar after only one night.

“Good morning, sweetheart,” she whispered,

nose buried in my bed-rumpled hair.

A new day begun.

 

~ Mk Michaels