Sunday evening and I find myself nursing a lukewarm decaf latte in a Starbucks about 10 miles away from my home. Before collecting my drink I paid a visit to the loo and wound up with wet culotte pants from floor water which I ended up crouching under the disabled bathroom hand dryer trying to ward off. Grim. Why am I here again? Looking around, I feel like I’m plunged in a time machine, thrust into an alternative headspace around 2015 or ’16. Young, anxious, naive. In a chain café, surrounded by friends gossiping animatedly over hot coffee, eyes glued to laptops as if with invisible adhesive, shared tables strewn with papers and planners, each of these people all living in the illusion of their own personal realities. Somewhere inside me rolls up a pang of wistfulness for October days long gone, amidst a certain angst I didn’t know the name for back then. Do I even know her name now?
It’s like nothing changes but everything does too. Why is this? What is this? The thing about going somewhere, where nobody knows you is that you could be anyone. I wonder what part of me craved that anonymity and chased after it… on a Sunday of all days. Me. In my quiet, simple life, dictated by quiet, simple routine, usually occupied with quiet simple tasks like cooking and cleaning and meal prepping and other Sunday-esque things.
The end of summer no longer clings to the air and has instead been replaced by a mild but determined chill. The trees are a melange of earth and fire, the sun hangs low and the energy broods a kind of sorrow. Is that me? Or is that the world reflecting herself back to my receptors?
I’ve missed this. Finding a feeling and painting it with words. Brushstrokes of brain. Mind and soul clicking into place as the keyboard taps and the muse is channelled. In this space, I can be anyone. I can finally even be me.
We’ve been feeling sad lately. R- and I both. But especially R-. I don’t know why. He doesn’t know why either. It’s all a bit difficult to conceptualise. All I know is that gentle but ever present lust for life I usually see in his dark and beautiful eyes has dulled like unpolished chrome and I desperately want to fill them back up. But you see; I know better than this now. There would have been a time in our ever evolving lives where I would have been desperate to make everything better and clutched at that feeling as if our lives depended on it. I feel that feeling now. That dense heaviness in the space where my heart lies, brimming with fear that is yet to be transmuted, yet to be integrated.
I observe the thoughts that come up and it’s truly fascinating to me that I can revert back to my inner child who makes up stories and grieves losses that haven’t even happened. I become the parentified child who cannot accept that sadness is a part of life’s tapestry. A self help author once wrote that “pain has no purpose” but I beg to differ. Without pain we do not know joy. Without darkness, the light cannot exist. Such is this world of duality and polarity. Such is the human experience.
For months we have been on a level playing field and despite my ups and downs in EMDR therapy, the relationship has stood strong and steadfast in the face of adversity. And now? Well that’s what it is. Nothing changes, yet everything does too. My darkness screams “what if it’s you? what if it’s because you’re not good enough?” My light whispers “You are perfect, just as you are. It is all divine. It is all love”.
And then there’s me. In the middle of Starbucks with wet culotte pants, an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. The worst bit is… they’re all me. I’m supposed to love them all? Really?
I ask at this time for wisdom, guidance, intuition and kindness to navigate this. Whatever this is. I ask for grounding, balance and stillness. I ask that I can be steadfast in my support and hold space with grace, strength and beauty. I ask that I know when and how to surrender to whatever may be.
And I give thanks. For this. For this weird Sunday evening where after many, many months, I’ve finally been given the chance to come home.
She paints with words 