Here We Go Again

The night after K and I broke up, I went out for a drink with friends.

They came over to indulge me--to play some poker and to make sure I wasn't about to gauge out my eyes with something sharp. I needed them. They stopped me from being overwhelmed by the oppressive freedom of filling the hours any way I chose.

And as we chatted over cocktails in the cement basement of a local bar, I remarked to one that I would have to start cultivating my crushes instead of ignoring them.

"Do you have a crush?" he asked, amused.

I did. A silly, adolescent, heart-palpitating, stomach-churning crush that snuck up on me from the middle of nowhere and took root before I even knew what was happening. It was absurd. It was rebounding at its finest. It made no sense whatsoever. True to my word, I cultivated it.

It worked.

And now what do I do? As silly as I was before, I suddenly find myself having real feelings--strong feelings, feelings that make me gasp--feelings that make me sigh in spite of myself like a character in the kind of romance novel we used to buy in college to read to each other in front of ski lodge fires while we drank more than anyone would consider strictly necessary.

Am I in any position to do this again so soon? Or is whatever it is not even close to being the beginning of anything worth talking about? Am I just naive enough to think that there's something there when there's nothing more than hormones and too much beer? Can my worn-out nerves handle it if there is? Where to begin? Where to go? How to make it work?

And then there's K. As much as I know that I did the right thing for both of us, I can no longer deny how much of my heart I left behind with him. When I see him, I feel all the comfort that our years together have made second nature to both of us--and none of the annoyance that made me leave.

And I don't know what to do. With any of it.

On Independence

So far, more than anything else, independence means loneliness. It's a strange sensation--in the B.K. years, I was more often without a social network than within one. Loneliness was a second skin that I drew around myself and called freedom when I lacked the tools to find a home for myself among others. In Florence, trying to escape, I found a home wandering the streets, or on the steps of a medieval orphanage decorated with white terra cotta babies by Luca Della Robbia with a book in one hand and a block of cheese in the other. (I only recently discovered that the metal grate at the front of the building that I could never identify was in fact a depository for unwanted babies, and that similar orphanages had 90% infant mortality rates). There more than anywhere else, but everywhere--alone. Lonely.

K changed things for me in ways that I'm only beginning to understand. Someone I could call, just because I wanted to say something. A place I could go, just because I didn't want to be at home anymore. Nights out that stretched into the wee hours, and wee hours at home that stretched into work days remarkable only for the frequency of emails flying back and forth between our two computers and the general struggle that staying awake and appearing productive required. And comfort--more than anything else, comfort. As the giddy newness wore away, it was replaced with a sigh of relief every time I slid my chin over K's shoulder or he nestled his head on my chest. Home.

And with these joys came a fearful dependence. I knew that just as easily as I had glided into the life of weekdays on the couch watching sports and weekends out with the girls, I could glide out and return to my loneliness skin. For all its familiarity, loneliness could not compete with two real arms--and so I fought to keep them around me forever. And as time wore on, keeping them eclipsed any reason for wanting these arms, these specific arms, attached to this person. Slowly, slowly--but inevitably, at the end--my loneliness skin came slipping back.

As I unwillingly welcomed my old friend back to the fold, I began to fight harder. If only we moved in together, our lives would start to overlap again. If only you weren't so. If only you could. If I weren't. If I would. And at the end: if only I could live like this. The only thing that frightened me more than the idea of spending the rest of my life in a relationship that I had come to know to my very core was wrong for both of us was the idea of spending it alone, and my stubborn nature tentacled itself to my choice even as I struggled desperately to find a way to force myself to let go.

And then I did it. Four years, eight months, and two weeks after the beginning--I did it.

It seems a strange thing to announce as though it were a triumph. At its core, it is a deep and ponderous loss--of time spent, of work and energy devoted, of love shared. But I choose to emerge a victor from the self-imposed destruction of my comfort zone. At once the end of a long trajectory and the work of a moment, it forces me to build my life anew.

I'm terrified. But I'm free.