Figuring It Out

I’ve actually written a blog or two over the past couple of days, filled with tales of struggle and battle and learning and healing and a bunch of other bullshit.

Yeah, you all know it’s a struggle and a battle after going through sixteen years and a lifetime of emotional abuse.

But, for now, I need to let go of all of that for a while and just focus on the good. Because all the struggle and battle have led me here, to this moment, when it is good. And without having gone through the darkest of the dark and fought to build a life that I can be proud of and embrace, then the good wouldn’t be as good and maybe I wouldn’t be able to really feel the joy that I feel. To feel that great joy one has to be able to feel that great pain. And I guess the best that we can hope for is that the joy will finally one day outweigh the pain.

And lately, that’s where I’m getting to. Still learning, still painful, still a struggle. But the joy is so beautiful and so wondrous that it’s worth all the struggle to get through to this moment. And when I fell asleep wrapped up tightly in his arms on Valentine’s night, that’s when I let go a little bit more. And that’s when I realized that I still have a lot of work to do to get to the point where there isn’t two days of drama in my own head leading up to one really lovely, beautiful night.

He’s not the one doing something wrong, it’s my own baggage and crap dragging along behind me that are getting in the way. And maybe that my expectations have been set to a certain point and I am anticipating him living up to those expectations. And he’s helping me learn how to let go of these very destructive expectations by simply not living down to them. He’s teaching me, slowly but surely, that I don’t need to figure things out beforehand. That I don’t need to plan 35 different ways to say something or to approach him or anything like that. I can be simple and easy and honest and he responds to that.

And I know he’s afraid and carries his own baggage along with him. And I can see it in his eyes sometimes and I can feel it in his tentativeness around me sometimes. There are moments between us that are so filled with what’s unsaid and what we’re afraid to say that it’s almost palpable. And when we do just let go and just be with each other, it’s so simple and beautiful and effortless that it’s helping me learn to just be with him -- a very difficult thing for me to do.

 And in the late night hours, when we finally fall asleep and he won’t let me out of his embrace even in that slumber, I just want to exist in that moment forever. I have never felt so secure and so safe and so wanted than I do in those quiet, peaceful, intimate moments.

And it’s not about true love or being with him forever or anything like that. It’s about existing only in that time, in that moment and just being able to be vulnerable and let my walls down and not getting my teeth kicked in when that happens.

 And I hope that if this relationship ends -- or when this relationship is over -- that the lessons I learned will carry on to the next one and make that one even easier and let me leave piles of Samsonite behind.

 And for now, I’ll go back to Melissa Etheridge, because she always seems to have the right words. “'Cause I wanna stay here in this moment/Can I quietly slip into you/You and I can stay here in this moment/Let the world fade away, I just want to stay with you”

You may now return to your regularly scheduled life…