Category: prose

The Breath Before

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I don’t often write fiction. I don’t think I do it particularly well, but I’ve been reading a lot of Junot Diaz this weekend and I guess I wanted to see what would happen. Here’s an excerpt. 

 

You are sitting with your back against a white, wood-paneled wall. The sun is streaming in. It is Winter, yet somehow still bright out. It is early morning and the cold seeps through the cement of your crappy apartment near the subway and all the way through to the wood of your wall. The cold is soothing on your back. It is 6:25 in the morning, and you are unsure if what is happening to you right now is real.

Moments before, you had snuck to his phone and looked through. A cardinal sin, yes. But you have a gut feeling. That’s how you justify it. Or maybe your life-long desire to Nancy Drew your way out of situations has reared its ugly head again. Or maybe you were just curious. Maybe all three.

Anyway, you do it, and after snooping through some text messages, you find photos. Lots of photos. And videos. Some girl whose face you don’t know, but in that moment it doesn’t matter. Later, you will wonder if she was in on it, if she knew, but, in the end that won’t matter either. She didn’t promise you anything. All you know is that the photos are there and the photos mean it’s the end and the photos rip you down the middle.

Now, you are sitting against the wood wall, trying to understand what your life looks like in this moment.

Later, after you have kicked him out of your small studio, you will realize you need to be at the lab in twenty minutes. In a daze you will find clothes and your coat. You won’t know how you got there, but the doors will swoosh open. You will duck past the interns waiting to be briefed by you. “Hi, Doc!” one will call out as you give a small, tight-lipped smile back. Later, he will remark to his friends that you seemed off that morning.

You will find your way into the office. Dan, your lab partner, will turn to ask why you’re late. He will see your face and know. He’ll wrap his arms around you and you will allow yourself a single sob. A convulsed release of the air and pain that have been sitting in your chest since 6:22 that morning when you saw the photos. He’ll give you a squeeze, then you’ll release yourself from his embrace, smile, and say, “Here we go,” before you turn to do your goddamn job.

That’s for later, though. Right now, you are sitting in your room, your back against a cold, white, wood-paneled wall. You look at his body splayed across your bed, his feet hanging off. You pull at your lower lip, your nervous tick he always picks on.

When you found the photos, your stomach tightened, you caught your breath. Suddenly, for a second, you saw only white, before it faded away and the photos and the videos were there again, as clear as day. It was as though your brain has taken a screen cap of that image, so that later when you are deciding what to do, it would throw the memory of this moment back front and center. Your ears start ringing. It will not stop until you make it into Dan’s arms later that morning. You drop to your knees, before getting up, putting on the first dress you can find and sit on the bed.

You find yourself there now, your back pressed against the wall for stability.

Later, after you have woken him and told him what you know and told him to leave, he will sit there, his eyes red and wet. He will apologize, but he will know better than to ask for another chance. He will tell you he still loves you, and how sorry he is before you finally get him out the door. It will take nearly an hour.

That hasn’t happened yet, though. That will be the memory you sit with later that night over a glass of whiskey that you are crying into: the image of him on the edge of your bed for the last time.

Right now, you are sitting at the other edge of your bed, you back against the cold, white, wood wall. You pull at your lip and furrow your brow. You wonder for a second if you could simply erase the image. If you could make things easy. If you could continue unabashed and unabated.

You know you cannot.

You take a breath. In. Out. You take another breath in and reach over to shake his leg.

“I need you to wake up now.”

Are You Any Better Off?

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Stop. Breathe. Again.

Good.

I am looking out on the ocean at Diamond Head, wiggling my toes in the sand. It is near sunset, and the tide has come up to my ankles. I look down towards surfers leaving the water and couples taking sunset-selfies. This is a nice beach. I think to myself.

Four years ago to the day, I stood on a beach one bright May morning not far from Diamond Head and thought the exact same thing, this is a nice beach. It was my first morning in Hawai‘i, and I had woken up early to go for a run. I explored my new surroundings, amazed that I had actually made the jump and moved here.

When I came to Honolulu in 2012, I had a whole host of reasons why I chose to leave Southern California:

  • I had never lived more than an hour from where I grew up, now was the time to leave.
  • I had never “adventured” after college the way I had wanted to.
  • I was young and figured,”if not now, when?”
  • It was time to ~let go of my stuff~

All of these things were true, in some form or another. Still, none of them were at the true root of why I left: at the time, I hated who I had become.

I don’t mean that in a terribly self-deprecating way, but I had made choices that were actively against the kind of woman I wanted to be. I stayed in relationships that left me feeling hurt, disrespected and jealous. I was selfish and deceitful, with the justification that I “deserved” certain moments of happiness in my life. I drank too much. I partied too hard. I was reacting moment-to-moment only seeking the next high of happiness or excitement because I was a “twentysomething” and that was my right, dammit.

So, I ran. It’s what I’m best at, after all. I didn’t ghost; I found a job and made plans and tried to make a place for myself, but I packed up my life and ran as far as I could. I stood on that beach, the morning of May 1st, 2012, hoping– as cheesy as it was– that it was also the dawn of some, elusive, better version of myself.

Four years later, to the day,  I am standing on a beach looking out at the ocean, facing that question head-on: Am I better off now than I was four years ago?

The tide tickles my calves as it comes up further. A breeze wraps itself around me and reminds me of the mantra I used a moment ago. I close my eyes.

Stop.

I think about the girl I was at twenty-four. I moved here and grew. What I didn’t fully realize was how much growth can and will sting. That it still involved choices I would come to shake my head at. Becoming “better” doesn’t protect you from getting hurt sometimes. It also doesn’t prevent you from hurting others. What I see now is that the depth we can hurt each other is matched only by our depth to love each other as well.

Breathe.

Four years later, I have a longer lens with which to look back on my life. Amid the tense and exciting moments, I take stock of the pauses, the silence. Sometimes all we need is a moment to move past our initial, irrational response.

On the cusp of reactionary implosion, our brain can kick in if we let it. It can read the situation, triage, and clarify what needs to happen next to move past this. The silence isn’t complacency. It’s the time where our mind took a moment to cement in the lesson or the story or the power we would need. It stores it deep inside ourselves, a reserve of strength and wisdom saved for the next time we need it.

Again.

The way we learn is cyclical. We come to understand something, we face it in a different context, and all we can hope is that we handle it with a little more grace than we did before

If anything, the scars we had from the last time should serve as a map we can read as we navigate through this current struggle. ‘I have been here before,’ we remind ourselves, ‘I will come out on the other side. I know what I need to do to get through this.’ We begin the familiar rituals we do to heal. We try to learn. We try to get better. We don’t always succeed, but maybe, just maybe, this time, it’s a little easier.

Good. 

I open my eyes. I look back at the ocean. I have run Diamond Head many times, but rarely stop to come down to the beach and take a moment to breathe. I look at my legs and feet in the water.

I see the scars on my body, I see the parts of myself that have already stretched like new skin over healing hurts. I see where I have grown. I see the wounds and the dark parts of myself that still need to heal. Maybe the difference, now, is that I see the shape and color of the work that will go into that growth.

In some ways, not much has changed. And yet, everything has changed.

An initial version of this included the following passage from Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, and I felt compelled to share it still. It’s one of my favorite books. I highly recommend it. 

But as I wrote his name now, I knew I was doing it for the last time. I didn’t want to hurt for him anymore, to wonder whether in leaving him I’d made a mistake, to torment myself with all the ways I’d wronged him.

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t  have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?

– Strayed, Cheryl (2012-03-20). Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 1) (p. 258). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The Lies I Unlearned When I Chose Love

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Little known fact about me: my parents and older brother call me “baby,” ensuring I will be some Filipina child’s “Tita Baby” some day. 

Anyway, this is a letter to myself– now, myself in the past, and myself going forward.

Baby,

The world will tell you that you need to guard  your heart and only give love to people  that “deserve” it.

Maybe they’re right.

And they wouldn’t be the first. “If love be rough with you,” a poetic but hot-headed man once said, “then be rough with love.”

Another man once wrote, though, that if you lead a loving life, it is natural— if not essential— that you will fall in love. You will tumble head first into vats of it. Love will be gooey, messy and unpredictable. It will get in your eyes and under your nails, and you will find it dried behind your ears days after you thought you had finally scrubbed yourself clean of it.

And that’s beautiful, but it’s terrifying. It will scald you. It will go up your nose and make you cough in that painful way that rips open your throat. It screws up your clothes, staining in a way and no amount of bleach will get it out. This love shit will seriously fuck you up.

But stop running from it, baby. Stop running from love because you’re scared that you’ll never be able to scrub it away. You’re right. You won’t. It will leave a permanent mark. It’ll burn you in ways you weren’t ready for.

But stop running.

Here’s the lie you must let go: the belief that love only looks like one thing. To choose love is to understand that love comes to us in so many forms.

Love is not just kisses and rainbows. Love is bigger than presents and the person who holds you when you cry. Love is not only the arms of someone else. It is not always soft. It is not always simple. It is not always laid out and easy to reach. Sometimes you think you’re there only to learn that love is at the top of an impossibly long, climb.

Sometimes, love is the brutal, honest truth laid out on the table, looking at all the parts of that truth and making the choice. It sees all the shaky, scary bits and says, “Yes. I’m in.

Sometimes you have that conversation with a partner.

Sometimes with a friend.

Sometimes with yourself.

Still, that’s not the only way love manifests. It’s the text chain with a friend reminding you of your own strength. It’s the head tilt and the quiet question, “Are you okay? What do you need?” It’s the kid who puts everything on the field for you and for them. It’s the moment you hear your own heartbeat and feel joy.

Here’s the other lie: they have been trying to convince you that your heart will only produce so much love. They are convinced that you will meet your quota. That someone will see your secret stash of it and steal it and not give you any in return. That will happen. It will fucking hurt like hell. It will make you feel frustrated and sad.

But it won’t mean you don’t have any more love to give.

So, even when it’s difficult, choose love. Even when you know you might get hurt, run towards love.

Well, don’t run. Walk. Stroll. Take your time. Know what it really means to give and receive it. Sit with the knowledge that you will hurt other people. Love doesn’t guarantee constant happiness, but it does create joy.

But choose love. Walk towards it even when it annoys the shit out of you. Choose love even when it is ripping you at the seams. There is a fine line between DEconstruction and REconstruction, and the two are not mutually exclusive.

You will get burnt. You will be betrayed. You will realize that what you thought was love was actually something else, or that it became something else. You will cry and feel sadness and be hurt.

But you are no fool. Don’t believe that choosing love makes you naive or a dupe. You are not unworthy. Just because love transforms or leaves or isn’t enough doesn’t mean you were weak or wrong. Your ability to give love was never a weakness. In reality, it’s the greatest strength you possess.

So, stop running FROM something, and move towards love. When you see it at the top of an impossibly long rope, climb it and ring the bell for youself. Even if you fall after, you got there in the first place, the echoed ringing a reminder of how powerful you really are.

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The Miracle Is That We Are Beloved

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The worst part of death is the terrible silence. It is absolute– a void so empty it is rich in its darkness.

Be it of a loved one, a relationship, or a period of our life, there is always still the silence. The pause after the final breath. The moment when any denial we had about what was happening is stripped away. We can only look down at our hands and know, ‘This is my reality now.’ I heard that silence when I hung up the phone with my grandfather after telling him goodbye, knowing I wouldn’t be able to see him before he passed. I felt it when I returned home from an ex’s, with three years of my life reduced to a few garbage bags in a now empty-feeling apartment. There is nothing we can do but look down at our hands and realize that our previous reality has shattered, and that there is a looming darkness we can only face.

It is easy to feel unworthy in those moments. Everything we held dear has been stripped from us, it seems, and we realize just how fragile we are, how human and imperfect we are as we stumble through life. It is easy to look in the mirror, see nothing but the pain and darkness of that death and feel like we will never find the love or joy or happiness we are certain has left forever with death.

And yet.

Growing up, I had a priest who once reminded us that the renewal of God’s love at Easter didn’t, you know, have to take place on Easter. “If not today,” Fr. Fred told us, “Easter will come.” Even if it was not that Sunday morning, we were reminded that at the end of it all God’s love renews, heals, saves. Even after we have beaten, spit on, and ridiculed Christ, God still decides we are worthy of His love and forgiveness. 

I am reminded of this now, on an Easter Sunday where I am in the process of rebuilding. The darkness we face after a death isn’t a completely false one. Often times, it is an important reminder of our own humanity and imperfections, of the places we faltered and failed.

The darkness isn’t the lie; the lie is that we will never find that joy again.

I know that the miracle of God’s love is not that the world is perfect or that everything is good. The miracle is that, with those imperfections, we are still beloved. The miracle is that even when we are sure we are horrible and hopeless creatures, God reminds us that we are still worthy of love and grace. If we allow them, we still have people and moments that move us to uproarious laughter and countless joy.

This morning, I send a friend of mine a quick Easter message saying, “Rejoice! His is Risen!” He replied in kind and mentioned how blessed we were that we looked inside the tomb and see that is empty.

There, too, is the miracle. The story of Easter does not run away from the notion of death itself. Christ is still crucified on Good Friday and mourned for those three days. We all have parts of ourselves that die as we seek renewal. God’s love doesn’t make death disappear. The resurrection is not a wiping-the-slate-clean reaction of naivety. When Christ looked down and showed us His hands after the resurrection, they weren’t magically devoid of scars. Christ still bore the wounds of His past and crucifixion, even after He rose.

Easter is not about easy fixes or magic healings. It is when we acknowledge both death and the imperfections that came before it but do not stay in the darkness with the decaying forms of our past. The tomb is empty. We don’t have to cling onto those parts of ourselves anymore. Instead, we decide to walk out of the darkness with Christ and rise up better than before.

So, as this Easter comes, I am eager to walk forward in the miracle of God’s love. I look down at my hands and see the reality that they are still weathered and broken from the last part of my life.

This is my reality now, and that is okay. It is good. It is blessed. I have no need to dwell in these past pieces of my life. Instead, I stand up and walk forward out of the tomb and towards light.

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A Letter to My Wayward Self.

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Over the past few months, I’ve been having my students write papers about love. In doing so, it made me both read and reflect on my own experiences with love and growing up– especially in my early twenties. This is where that led me.

A letter to my wayward self.

My dear girl,

I have no idea where you are running to, but I promise you none of the directions you are heading towards are “home.”

I know: you are horrible at the long game. There is no patience in your bloodstream, no chill hidden anywhere in your bones. You are all chicken skin and red hot veins. Your muscles are overrun with fast-twitch fibers. You go far beyond “starry-eyed”— your pupils dilate again and again as your mind wanders in explosive bursts with fury, unprepared for what happens in the moments after when the star has burned out and things are dark again.

You are spontaneous decisions and seeking the next high. Yours is a rabbit-heart that beats furiously, always asking questions: when? who? why how what where where where where? always searching. You race—no, bounce and sometimes tumble— down trails, so assured that the next turn will lead you to find home. You are certain that this rock or that tree is a sign, that the next moment will finally find the thing you want most: an anchor, a resting place, a haven that just might soothe the pitter-patter that runs from your heart, through your veins and into every other part of you.

The problem is, “home” is a vague X on a map without a key. There is no description or clue as to what it is. So you keep thinking you’ve found it: in the hands of one boy, in the furtive glances of a different man, the fervor of a blurred dance floor, the bottom of an empty wine glass. You hop from all these things, assured that each sip or kiss or beat is a sign that you are almost where you need to be.

It’s a confusing concept, but I promise you none of these things are where “home” is. Don’t confuse the feeling you get when you catch his eyes meeting yours with the experience of being appreciated fully in the gaze of someone who loves you. Don’t mistake a flurry of kisses for a downpour of actual caring. Don’t assume the pain-numbing warmth at the end of a long sip is the same as the soothing release of healing when you actually take care of yourself.

“Home” is not found in the temporary bliss of mind-numbingly good kisses. Don’t get me wrong— you can still have mind-numbingly good kisses, but they are merely decoration on the outside. “Home” is built by weathered boards that have been worked on and sanded. They are stained with difficult decisions and tears. Their nails are the choices you make, hammered in with mutual respect. They are painted with the laughter of jokes built over years of shared comfort. Home will wrap you in its arms when you walk into it looking like something the cat dragged in. Home will stay standing when you tear the furniture apart in rage. Home will still protect you when you can do nothing but sit there in silence.

I wish I could tell you things turn out okay.

The problem is, it’s hard to know when you have found a forever-home. Sometimes we outgrow a place, decide we need to do what’s best, move on. Or we realize the foundation isn’t solid. Or we take a job in Hawai‘i and move thousands of miles away.

Here’s the thing you will need to learn: home can never be some summit that you have to venture to. Home should never be a place that can only be entered when terms and conditions apply. Home can never truly be yours if it only exists within the happiness of another’s.

The only place you will truly find it is when you stop, close your eyes, and breathe. You will feel the ground beneath your feet, the beat of your heart in your own ears, the muscles behind your eyes relax. Then, you will realize that home was never some external site to begin with. You will realize the only real home is the quiet, still place where you both know and love yourself, exactly as you are.

And in that moment, you will finally be found.IMG_8512.JPG

 

“Shoots”

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“Shoots.”

As soon as the word slips off my tongue, I feel stupid.

It’s oddly a surreal moment for something so small: I am huffing and puffing up a hill off the Pali highway. The guys ahead of me say they’re veering off. A puff of air fills my cheeks, and without thinking expels through my lips. “Shoots guys, bye!”

To anyone not from Hawai‘i, it’s probably innocuous enough– maybe a weird use of the word “shoot,” which usually either conveys a gun blast or a substitution for an angered exclamation– but nothing offensive.

Still, I’ve lived here long enough to know that, here, it’s a word usually used by locals, something like a mix of “okay” and “sounds good” (I think). I’ve also lived here long enough to know that I am by no means “local.” I could double my four years of residency and I still don’t know that I’d be able to claim that I’m “local.” I didn’t grow up here, I moved here for a job, I spend most of my time near the University. I don’t really get to make a claim on anything.

Which is fine. I’m not upset– I know I’m lucky to get to live here at all. I’m just consistently in a state of uncertainty: is my living here an exploitation in and of itself? Will I ever be able to feel at home here?

Of course, those aren’t questions running through my mind as I walk up the road. I’m just hiking, and trying to talk story with a few guys who are helping my friends and I get back on the right trail.

I say the word and immediately feel like an idiot. Why did I do that? I think to myself. Who do I think I am? I have, frankly, silently mocked transplanted folks who try desperately try to “sound local,” failing miserably at hiding their own discomfort with being a stranger in a place they want to try and claim as theirs. I have tried to keep myself in check time and again. It’s not a big deal, I suppose, but I know better. I know that I sounded stupid, too. So what the hell happened?

Later, the memory slips back into my mind and I sit in my discomfort. “Shoots.” A word bandied over my head at guys passing each other in my gym. It is thrown down hallways and over balconies by students at the schools where I teach as they share plans and gossip for the day. Sometimes I have it bounced at me, a pass I’m not ready for, by kids after I clarify an assignment, folks who assume I’m local, or people who decide to share it with me anyway.

I hold it for a moment and admire it, like every other local word, phrase, or marker I’ve learned. I haven’t been here long, but it’s long enough to appreciate living somewhere I can finally be mistaken as belonging. It’s is always tempting to slide on the cultural uniform of this place that has, in many ways, finally provided a haven for external acceptance. When I let myself slip, I act like I know how to play this game, exhale and throw a word or phrase in, hoping for a moment to let the masquerade continue.

Still, I know to do any of this– shimmying into someone else’s life as a disguise to make myself more comfortable– isn’t any better than any of the other times I’ve felt pressured to play with words or rules that weren’t mine either, in the name of “fitting in” or “being professional” or “getting ahead.” I know that, if I try and throw these words and phrases back, try to bandy and toss them with the same levity as actual locals, I’ll only fumble miserably.

Which, of course, is what I did that muggy afternoon walking up the Pali. For a moment, I thought I could get away with the ruse, with the idea that this was a world I could claim for myself when I know that’s the farthest thing from the truth.

“Shoots.” My mouth closes at the end of the word and my lips purse immediately, a quick burst of shame and embarrassment wash from my tongue to the tips of my toes.

I sit, later, and shake my head.

…Shit.

 

Stop and Figure Out What’s Yours

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It starts with checking your phone in bed. You wake up at 5:30AM, because it’s a habit you never really learn to let go of, even over summer vacation. Your eyes blink open, and your brain shoots a rapid fire message to all channels: “HOLY CRAP WHAT TIME IS IT AM I LATE?!”

You ignore the warm body stirring next to you and reach over. Grab your phone. As blue light bounces off your face, you get not just the time, but a reminder of the million other things you could look at right now. Your twitter notifications, what email came in over night. You decide a quick peek won’t hurt.

The peek turns into just answering an email or two. Then maybe a tweet. You chuckle as someone replies, begin to reply back, then try to quiet down so as to be considerate. You decide to quickly skim the news. It’s all important– an email from your principal, outstanding actions from fellowships, requests to host this chat or read this piece. It’s all good stuff. This is what it means to be a 21st-century educator, right? You’re always on. You’re always up-to-date. You’re always connected. You have to be ready to go at any time, because the world is still turning when your body is in bed.

All of a sudden, it’s 7:00AM. The person next to you kisses your cheek. “I love you,” you say, blue light bouncing off your chin as you look up. You don’t want them to forget as the rest of the world gets your attention.

“You too.” They patter off to get ready for their day. The shower runs. You find an article to share out. A witty note to add before the link. Scrape the meat off so it’s at 140. Good to go.

You put your phone down while your partner gets ready. You take a second, ask them about their day. You’re on summer break, so they don’t really ask about yours. Not because they don’t care, but because they can probably guess: gym. work. Summer can be a time to recharge, but you’re amusedly surprised to find out that constantly trying to better everything about yourself— your practice, your writing, your understanding of the world, your body– takes up a lot more time than anyone realizes (you included).

They have to go, you kiss them goodbye. “I love you,” you let them know, almost desperately. They know, and you know they know, and you trust that they love you too. The desperation isn’t that love isn’t there, but that it’s the only thing about yourself that feels constant and true anymore. It’s the knowledge that the sun rises in the morning. Everything else is a series of hop-skip-jumps along a path you’re trying to figure out as you go and that you’re pretty sure you’re going to screw up at some point.

They leave, and the phone is right back in your hand. You respond to a message, there’s another email. It should be made clear that none of this is drudgery, you love what you’re doing right now. It’s what fuels you. It’s the main part of you that feels talented, strong, smart. 

Before you know it, another hour has gone. You hop a bus home. You go to the gym for a few hours. Write, email, tweet in between sets, at stoplights. You’re never not-available. You’re never disconnected.

You get home. Write, edit, read a new piece (you’re a teacher, after all). Suddenly, it’s 4:30P, and you know that the day is rapidly coming to a close. You wonder where the time went. You wonder if you used it well. Didn’t you want to try and go on a hike today?

Now, you’re a little annoyed. At what, you’re not sure, but you are. You have to figure this out.

You get up. You look in the mirror. The contents of the apartment you’ve been in for less-than-a-year are still scattered about, so you never really moved in. It barely feels like yours anyway– no more so than the last less-than-a-year apartment, or the one before it. You’re always looking for something better, and when you think you’ve found it, something else always pops up.

You stop looking at the apartment and back in the mirror. Your face is there. Nose, eyes, mouth. You like your face, generally, but some days when you actually look at it, it’s a shock that it’s yours. It doesn’t really feel like yours.

It takes a second, and then you realize what’s been frustrating you for the past hour, day, week, months: when did you stop taking a second to quietly revel in ownership of yourself? When did your actions become a reaction to everything you thought you needed to do to be yourself?  Did you actually ask yourself what “you” (in all senses of that word) looks like right now? 

You tilt your head– one way, then another. Put your hand your collarbone, feel the body stretch and grow beneath the skin as you breathe in. Breathe out again. Your chest collapses. Your heart beats. Yours.

The mark of the modern educator may be connectedness, but if the mark of a great educator is being authentic to yourself, I should probably take a second to figure out who that person is. That process doesn’t end, and it doesn’t need to be public. If anything, it needs to be in the quiet moments of my own breath, or the soft spaces with people where the walls are down and my own existence feels like enough.

I’ve been beating myself up all week because I didn’t have anything to say here. I realized that I’ve been so focused on authoring myself for other outlets, I lost sight of my own center.

I don’t have a lot of time left, but I think it might be enough to stop and make sure I understand where I am right now. So when the real work begins, I know exactly who is in the classroom with my students, and not the approximation of who I was trying to create.

We Are Complete Within Ourselves: Stories and Spaces

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“Do you and your boyfriend tweet at each other a lot? I see some couples do that and I can’t help but laugh.” I am at a wedding, and making small talk with dozens of people, the only attendees I know being the bride and my boyfriend. I have just shared my love of all things “new media” with someone.

“I do too!” I share a laugh, “but no. He’s not really into social media. He’s more private than me.”

“Oh…” she trails off, nodding. “Well, it’s a good fit then, you two together?”

I think, and nod as I say, “Yes, yes it is.”

When I was a young, like most moon-eyed teenagers, I assumed that whoever I ended up with would be just like me. We would like all the same movies, we would have the same hobbies. We would agree on everything, and love would be easy. It shouldn’t be too much work, right? When you loved someone enough? “Love is all you need,” yes?

Most of us who have been in a serious relationship now laugh at those starry-eyed dreams. We know now that love takes hard work, effort, tough choices, a deep commitment to stand by someone, even when they are at their lowest.

Still sometimes, in those low points, I used to try and measure my relationships based on those initial affections and mutual interests, worried they would somehow be “not enough.” Did it matter that we didn’t share all our hobbies? Did we “fit” right?

And sometimes, things aren’t enough, and they end. I used to think of all my breakups, in aggregate, as all cases of “all the things he would never be able to give me, or me to him.” I used to see my failed relationships as these long tapestries filled with rips and patches that just showed how we never quite fit into each other correctly, the fabrics and thread never really working out. Eventually, the piece was so threadbare, the thing unraveled.

I realize, now, that deficit thinking of not only myself, but others, has been more hurtful than helpful.

Now, I know that it isn’t about fitting INTO each other so much as BEING with each other. I never needed someone to complete me, nor did my exes, nor do any of us.

Instead, what we need is the ability to navigate the world in similar spaces alongside each other, even when it is hard. We need someone who sees us as our complete selves, and shares space with that identity, instead of trying to fill in false notions of “gaps.” In the end, no matter how many spools of thread you try and wrap around each other, you cannot force very different people to share very different spaces.

I see this now so clearly.

Other men have treated me well, but what I have now is more than just mutual respect and caring. What I needed is someone who stands right next to me in those difficult spaces. There is a deep, cultural, gut understanding of who I am not just in likes or dislikes, but as a person.

Yes, I could probably find someone who treats me well and/or likes all the things I do, but how many people in the world are going to see every part of you– marvelous and terrible in its humanity– hold your hand, and say, “I’m here. I got you. I love you,”? How often do you find the person who not only sees who you are, but can see past it to all the other stories that created the space you now inhabit? How rare is it to find the person that can read and understand those past stories as well as you do?

I am a firm believer that I better understand my present by reflecting on my past. I have long forgiven and forgotten frustrations I had with past relationships. I don’t regret most things; they don’t hurt. They read like old chapters building to the next part of the story.

I understand I don’t know the future, but what I do know is how learning from this past makes me feel so lucky to have the present. I see how much the universe has worked to push me to this place where the only person I am asking to complete me is me. Where the question I ask my partner (who, yes, is the bees’ knees) every day is not ‘am I enough?’ but one that I feel confident gets me the answers I need:

Will you share this space this me, even when it’s hard? Can we share our stories? Do they matter to you?

That sounds like a good place to begin.

  

It can only whisper back at us. It can no longer roar.

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It’s astounding, really, how quickly the human mind is able to go into damage control. The body is often the star of regeneration, regrowth, and healing; we celebrate the body’s ability to accept and become attached to new parts, grow back bits of ourselves that have been stolen and hacked off, or mimic the actions and feelings of a limb when we are left wanting.

The body can even take over when the worst happens. The main functions for the body itself to survive– blood-pumping heartbeats, air-filling breaths– are programmed to continue no matter what is happening in the outside world. Without choosing too, the body works within itself to make sure it keeps on living.

The human mind, however, works differently. A sponge of information, the mind rarely needs to work to attach itself to new ideas or memories. Instead, we constantly take in everything surrounding us. We are bombarded by a seemingly unending stream of images, soundbytes, voices, words, numbers opinions beliefs emotions faces tacticsideashopesstragegiesfantasiesdesires. The mind is consistently full and racing to process, file, and respond to all of these things.

When disaster–or at least an intense shake-up of the normal day’s happenings– occurs however, the mind must make a switch. There is too much going on, and it becomes like the body and begins to triage. It prioritizes the necessities that must remain with you on the other side of this moment, this temporary crisis.

The basic facts of the memory remain: the date, time and place, the clinically bare images that swoop through when you try and piece together something; the heart of the memory still beats and the lungs still take in shallows breaths of air. Maybe the eyes flutter and a slash of color or hint of scent peek through.

There are other things, though, that the mind decides is no longer safe to keep as a memory. Things that were too intense or too emotional or just too damn vivid to live on in our mind’s eye, and the mind proceeds to slowly rob us of them. Even if it’s something we may desire to keep, there are some things that are perhaps no longer worth knowing. To know them, to feel them, to wrap oneself in the blanket of that memory would be too raw, too confusing, or too painful to keep.

So it fades.

Morning comes, and the first gray-yellow rays sunshine creep in through your windows. Just as the sun comes up, it sheds light on the memories of the previous day. The colors are less vivid when stripped of their once-black background. The memory that had so powerfully ran through your mind in crazy loops, begins to slow, then walk, then fade quietly into the background. We open our eyes to reality again, and we re-align and re-adjust to what was once normal, or what now is normal. The mind accepts the occurrences of the previous day and, if possible, moves past them. When we try to recall the memory, it can only whisper back at us. It can no longer roar.

Are we angry at the mind for taking these memories away? Or, deep down, do we appreciate the mind for taking some of the responsibility off of ourselves?

Remembering is often considered such a sacred thing, something that we should be holding ourselves accountable to as often as we can. Perhaps, the mind robs us of these thoughts because it knows that, deep down, we may not really want to remember.

4 years old, but I still love this piece a lot.