In love

The lovers part

Again

And I crave solitude the way

A starving man craves Food

I lie in bed

Only silence

In the darkness I feel the sadness

Once so overwhelming

Now contains pinpricks of radiant light

Love

The pointed rock in my belly

Begins to radiate love in all directions

The supernova expands

My whole body feels warm and light

I am floating

In the darkness

My eyes open and I laugh in wonder

At having found my Bright Beloved

One of those (how many do we get in a lifetime? )

Who will always be connected to me

Always has been been

Since before we both were born

What a Miracle!

I reach out to him with the energy of my being

And feel him there, his sadness

I hug him to me and whisper comfort

I don’ t know if that’s his pain or mine

There is no difference

In the darkness, everything around me

Speaks of love

The hum of the refrigerator

Love

The warmth of the blankets

Love

My Beloved’s silence, his absence

Love

My loneliness

Love

The tic-toc of the rain starting

Love

In the sounds of the first raindrops

I think I hear him enter my home

With his key

He’s there, for a brief moment

I listen for him

Then he’s gone

Our love joins Love

The dark underground river that runs under our feet

Silent but unceasing

Containing all that is Love

The anger, pain, sadness,

The joy, laughter, communion

The light touch in passing

The jealous heat

The small gifts

The broken promises

The moments of electric connection

Our love swirls like water

Joining all the other lovers

Coming together

Then parting

Like waves on a shallow beach

The sands hiss

He recedes again

I whisper his name but for once

Don’t reach for him

The Very First Lie

In my very first memory, I must have been about 2 or 3, and I’m sitting in a high chair. My mother has just left the house – I have the impression that the door has just now closed – and I’m SCREAMING for her to come back. I’m bereft and sobbing. My dad and his friend are there – the friend with whom we lived for a brief time in San Francisco before we got the house in Berkeley – and they’re laughing at me.

I don’t know if this is a true memory or a dream, but the memory has a deep meaning for me. In it, I’m totally alone and terrified. The people who are supposed to protect me are laughing and mocking me, and my mother – my comfort and my support - has walked out and can’t or won’t hear my cries of need. Obviously, as an adult, I don’t fault her for leaving the house (if that is, in fact, what happened), but on a deep psychological level, this feels like an original wound. Abandonment. Rejection. These are the things that I’ve struggled with for my whole life. And this memory, somehow, represents the deep, deep pain of lifelong hurt.

Somehow, sometime, as a youngster, I believed a lie. I don’t know if anyone purposefully told me the lie, or if I just absorbed it through the messages I got from society, but somehow I absorbed the lie that someday, there would be one person who would love me and protect me and be with me forever, as my partner, lover, friend, and confidante. I just assumed I’d someday meet this person, as naturally as the sun coming up in the morning and setting in the evening. I didn’t think I’d have to try to meet him, or change myself to meet him, or spend years on Craiglist or on dating sites or speed-dating or any of that. I just assumed it would happen. And I assumed that after that, my real life would start.

The funny thing is that I’ve always been critical and thoughtful about what my culture has told me. I’ve always questioned the status quo, always made my own choices not based on what society said I was supposed to do. Except in this one area, where I bought the lie hook, line, and sinker. It never even occurred to me to question it. Until now. Until, nearing 40, I realized that lie was never true.

And now I’m staring at this lie – this false belief that has insinuated itself into every cell in my being – and I don’t know how to stop believing it. The depth and strength of my longing for this thing that will never happen is so intense that sometimes, at night, alone in my bed, I still cry for it, like I did that time when I was 2, in the high chair. I weep and hold a pillow to me and feel that something must be so badly wrong with me that nobody has ever chosen me in the way I thought I’d someday be chosen.

Intellectually, I know how ridiculous it is to expect one person to be our everything, and to wait to be chosen by someone. I know that’s not right. I know that everything I need to be happy, I possess within myself, and that no one person can make me happy. Nor should I expect one person to make me happy. It’s not fair for me to expect that from anybody, and it sells myself short. I know that. But I still long for it, deeply, like I’ve never longed for anything else.

It’s the same longing I felt for my mother in that very first memory. Acellular longing, the longing of spirit for that spirit world where there is no pain, no need, no suffering. It’s not a longing for an actual person, it’s the longing for relief, for a return to that simplicity of pure light, the longing for that place before consciousness.

And each time I realize that I don’t have that deep belonging, the soul-to-soul connection that will always be there and never go away, and that I will never have that, it crushes me whole, knocks me to the ground. I withdraw, both physically and emotionally and in every way. I walk around with a stunned look on my face. I hide in my house, my skin on fire like every nerve is exposed. I wait for the grief and pain to wash over me and pass the way I know they will, because they always have. And I know I’ll get up again, laugh again, dust myself off, and try, once again, to see the joy and beauty and happiness that I’m so lucky to have in my life.

But I still don’t know how to abandon that deep dream, that lie, that false hope. It’s still in there, curled up and waiting, a little girl who still believes that her mommy – in the guise of a lifetime love, a person who will never leave - will come back through that door and hold her and never let her go.

Perspective

So my love just came back from 2-1/2 weeks of sailing into the sun and surf of southern Mexico. It was hard for me, very hard. I missed him, I was sad. Although I went out and socialized almost every day, I still felt his absence the way an amputee might feel the absence of a limb. It hurt. I got cranky, sad, depressed. I couldn't sleep. Even in my misery, I knew I was overreacting, that he was on a great adventure, that I was in his heart no matter where he was or what he was doing, and that I was surrounded by good friends and a lot of love. I knew I should be happy for him, and that he would come back to me eventually, with his twinkling eyes and the smile that tells me everything will be alright. I dredged up everything I've ever learned about being in the present moment, sitting in the pain and letting it dissolve into acceptance and joy, and still it didn't help, or would only help for a few minutes. I was anxious, couldn't concentrate, kept resisting the impulse to just go home and curl up in bed until he came back.

The second week, I barely heard from him, and got sadder and crankier as time went on. I kept trying to call but couldn't get through; there aren't a lot of cell phone towers in the ocean. Finally, midweek in the last week, I got through and he answered from the center of town, where he had just bought his plane ticket back. All my pain and sadness sat in my chest and I could barely speak. He asked what was wrong and all I could say, in an angry monotone, was how much I missed him. It was like my pain choked me and eclipsed the love and care that lay beneath it. Afterwards, I felt stupid and pathetic, being like that. What in the hell was wrong with me? I wanted to call back and apologize, but I've apologized so much to this man, that I resisted. Apologies, to my mind, are worthless if you can't promise that it won't happen again. And I knew I couldn't promise that.

So I kept the phone off (mostly) and tried as hard as I could to stay sane and centered. And then he came back, and as we got reacquainted, he told me a story.

That day, the day I called and was cranky and angry, my love saw death - not once, but three times. On the beach, with a crashing 8-foot surf, taking photos of a friend body-surfing, he heard screaming. A man was in the water, drowning, people thought. Lover, good in any emergency, dropped the camera, ran over, pulled him out of the water and gave him CPR amidst a group of screaming tourists and the man's two young, crying children. When the paramedics finally came, the man had been unconscious for over twenty minutes. He was turning blue. The EMT's took him away, and my love never was able to find out what happened to him. Telling me this, he said he could tell the man was dead as he was trying to get him to breathe. Head trauma, he thought.

There was more death, but the details aren't important. What is important is that in my compassion for this stranger, his children, and my love, who tried to save a life and couldn't, was the knowledge that, as I sat being sad to be parted from my man, two children lost a father, people somewhere lost a husband, lover, son, friend. And I was depressed because I wasn't with my man? God.

I'm trying very hard not to beat myself up too much about being so pathetic when vaster, more important things were happening. I'm hoping that this widening of my perspective, this letting go of expectation, and this deep appreciation for what I am lucky enough to have in my life right now, in the moment, will last. I know myself well enough to know it won't, not completely. But maybe I can remember it the next time things get bad in my head. Next time my brain tries to eat itself, maybe I'll see a windswept, desolate beach, and a man trying to save another man's life. And maybe I'll just relax, finally, and be able to appreciate the love and beauty around me, no matter what happens.