We Are Made to Bleed.
And Scab And Heel And Bleed Again

Once in awhile, I’m not analyzing anything. I’m simply eating a salad. Resizing an image in PowerPoint. Looking for a phone number. Folding laundry.

A lot of the time, I’m analyzing where I “am” right now. I’m measuring how I feel today against how I felt a month ago, a year ago, two years ago. I’m constantly stopping to marvel that this thing that first felt so devastating turned into some kind of beautiful and bright. How I can actually look back and see how the stages evolved: smashed to crushed to broken to bruised to tender to glowing to brand new. Each phase, once completed, has been easy to see; separated like a calendar page from the one that came before it.

Today, a vivid flashback to a lonely night in a hotel some months back. Colleagues on the phone with their wives, boyfriends, kids. Me in my room, hyper-aware of not being on the phone with my husband. Realizing I didn’t know how to end my day on the road without that. First, he’d say he had so many questions about my day that he wrote them down, didn’t want to forget any. He’d listen, rapt, to the stories about people he’d come to know through sprinkled details in conversations like this, a routine unloading of the day. He’d stop me to ask what we had for lunch, tell me to slow down, stop leaving out details. I’d hang up the phone and lie down emptied out, complete. I wouldn’t have thoughts swirling like reminders of things to remember to think about later.

I was painfully aware of not having anyone I needed to call that first night. I wanted to fast forward to the day I’d have that back again. I wanted all the tender things that come with a love that’s been steeped in knowing; the feeling of someone who always understands, always listens, always kisses my shoulder before I fall asleep, even if it’s over the phone.

The feeling that was lonely in the hotel room that night is now alone and clinging to that. The feeling that was ‘Oh God I don’t want to be alone. Bring me love that is real’ is now ‘My God that’s complicated. It takes a lot to intertwine lives like that and even more to untangle them.”

It’s one more thing my husband made me afraid of. As I cruise along, building strength and relearning all the things about him I shouldn’t have settled for and all the things about myself I shouldn’t have given up along the way, I’m struck with what he’s done, what we’ve undone.

When the time comes to think about fusing myself with someone else, sharing my life and my bed and my lunches with someone else, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. Which means I’ve still got more pages to turn. Just when I look in the mirror and think I see stronger, better, farther, I see there’s more to do. I remember that I can’t speed this up, can’t rip the scab off just because it doesn’t hurt anymore.