A quiet is starting to settle back over me, almost like waking up breathing freely after a cold. The snot has all been shaken loose, and I can draw clear, deep breaths. There’s a stillness in my limbs as though a fluttering bird is resting. Lighter despite inevitably rounding out the year weighing more.
Ha, you little fucker. I found you.
My Zen. I had it, months and months ago, before the Mouldy Cowboy and the Alcoholic, John the Greek, and the Ghoster. Before A, my dark horse. That’s when I lost her. I can pinpoint the moment, crying on my kitchen floor, when I realised she was gone. He hadn’t dumped me yet, that came the next day, but my gut knew. And Zen fled. She kicked off her heels, hitched up her skirt and ran, heart pounding in time to the slap of her bare feet on the concrete. She left me there.
But now she’s back. Her feet are blistered and raw and she needs some tending, but she’s resting now, occupying a quiet space inside my head. As she sinks into a comfy position, our breathing syncs. I’m starting to feel whole again.
It’s taken me four months to get over it, which is four times the length of time Sex and the City told me it should. “Half the time you were together to get over a break-up”. I should have been past it in a month but I didn’t give my head the space to do it. I ploughed into dating – first Ghoster, then the Alcoholic, a man who yelled at me then walked out on the third date because I wouldn’t tell him I had feelings for him (because I didn’t). Then the “old guy” whose name I can’t even remember. He was only 45 but he looked older. John the Greek and the Mouldy Cowboy, my manic week of back to back dates, and neither good.
Finally, the Boy, full of promise with no cigar.
Four months later and I have stopped trying to fill … what? It’s not a void or a hole although I have certainly been filling my holes. It was more abject than that. Humiliation certainly. Shame? Perhaps. He blew out my walls, planted a bomb under its weakest point and let it explode.
Then I tried to date while rebuilding. It’s no wonder I was exhausted, anxious. I was vulnerable to attack.
Fuck, that metaphor got away from me. Let’s rein it back.
I feel better. I feel more like me.
I just spent a completely easy weekend with D. It had been a long time since we’d seen each other, about 2.5 years. Three nights of stress-free chills. Drinks, oh, very many drinks, but music and stories and lightness. Sharing a bed with no hang-ups. I slept hard every night, no doubt made easier by the alcohol, but there was a comfort. Where normally I find it so difficult to share my bed, here we were entwined in our version of spooning most of the time. It was like falling asleep to the sound of rain.
It reminded me how it felt when I moved in with the Doctor. I often credit him with teaching me how to smile again after so many sad years. There was no Canadian accent saying “hey buddy, wanna go to the beach?” but there was D, dragging me to the local meat raffle, reminding me how simple it really can be.
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