I feel strangely alone in this apartment right now. How with everything unorganized and cluttered – sunscreen, shaving cream, nails lost from their sea of white walls, pens undressed of their caps, bills and address labels I won’t be needing soon – how with all of that surrounding me I feel a loss of something I’m not sure.
Perhaps it’s coming home at all. Often after I have been gone for a while I find myself wondering what it is I’m coming home to. Perhaps I expect a parade instead of a suitcase full of dirty laundry. perhaps I miss the ocean already with its simple tides, its every morning sand crabs digging their day tunnels at dawn. I feel movement there without having to move. dawn waves surf gulls moon waves dawn. Everything follows itself with complex simplicity, with trust, with confidence.
I’m use to saying goodbye. my boyfriend and I said goodbye to each other over a three year period. I’ve said goodbye to friends and cities and bars and tumbleweeds. I’ve said goodbye to clothes and shoes and posters and shed parts of myself like snakeskin. This morning my boy looked at me before we left the Outer Banks and said “you know what this feels like?” And I confirmed it, yes, “It feels like all the times we said goodbye to each other. Except this time we get to go back together.”
And back home, I’m saying goodbye again. Goodbye to an apartment that held me in a very lonely time, a very hard time. It sheltered my body when I curled up in bed and cried and it let me look out its windows in hopes of company. It let my cat skitter across its floors chasing bells and flies. It let me learn to love cooking and creating and writing again. It helped me shed a huge dark disfigured and still beautiful part of myself. It helped uncover fears – dark wooded and decomposing fears in my heart’s jungle. And it helped me welcome love back, my boy back and friendship back and myself back.
I feel I’m on the brink of something. An explosion of myself (not an implosion, but an explosion). A great leap into the sky, my colors ready to spark. I’ve become something at my beat up white desk, something I always knew I was just wasn’t ready to share. Something I feel on the inside that I want to wear on my outsides. I think I’m ready. I think I’m ready. My toes are wiggling.
My planet may be lonely at times. But all I know is that I must create my universe first. I am the dot at the center of my life. And pat it the dot at the center of his life and friends are the dots at the center of their lives and only when we feel at the center of our lives are we able to cross orbits into each other and create something beautiful and peaceful – perhaps eclipsed lives – not shadows, but two beings converging to make new colors. Or perhaps we reach out our arms and circle and dance and circle – our fingertips touching. Or maybe we don’t have to touch at all just as long as we watch the same stars like Christmas lights jumbled and tangled in the same endless box.
I may never learn how to say goodbye well and sadly I know there will be more of them. But goodbyes shouldn’t be easy. If they were I’m afraid it would mean I didn’t live well enough where I was, connect myself, leave skin and hair in the cracks, leave my life on the floors in the walls, spit down the sink, bloom on the windowsills. It would mean I didn’t leave anything to say goodbye to. And that’s the best I can do – fling the wet paint of myself – a Pollock masterpiece – on the walls and hope I can make new works of art wherever it is that I’m going.
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