healing and hope.

Last year, I dated someone very special for about three months.

I fell in love. In all the classic, movie manufactured ways. Being with him felt a little bit like heaven, and a lot like floating dreamily through time--which really did pass in the blink of an eye. I thought I had found it, the thing, the magic everyone talks about and the music that makes your whole being sing.

And I let myself tumble head over heels, arms open, heart first into this person who so deeply cherished me.

The thing is, we are not in love for the short term. We hope for forever, and this is what causes us to run with such abandon into the soul of someone we barely know. I'm not sure I understand what exactly happens for us to trust another with this sort of intensity--to be honest, I'm not sure anyone does. What I do know is that it does happen, and that no matter how it ends, it is always a gift.

It's been three months since we broke up. It was an unusual occurrence in the history of failed relationships. The feelings were still as strong as ever, but the foundation wasn't there. We desperately wanted to make it work and yet, we couldn't. As we held hands on my bed and whispered our deepest affections to each other, we knew it was time to let go. We didn't know for how long or if we could still be friends or if we'd ever get back together. We didn't even really understand why. 

But what we did know was that something was not right, and that no matter how hard we tried we were simply two pieces of a puzzle that didn't quite fit. 

Now, you may think that since an equal amount of months has passed as the time we dated, I would be wised up and over it by now.

I am not. 

But this doesn't mean that I am empty handed, either.

I am sad, a lot of the time. Confused. I don't have the answers I would have liked and to be honest, am still not even sure what the questions should be. 

I am healing.

A note on healing:

We think of it as a nice word. A word that indicates we feel better, even good.

But while healing does lead to those things, the process is still painful. I have had several surgeries throughout my life, and each time the weeks and sometimes months after were filled with hard work, tear soaked pillow cases, and a great deal of physical suffering. 

Healing is not nice. 

It is difficult. The agony we feel on the surface is just a small fraction of what is happening underneath, and it is no different when we are heartsick. 

I have stopped asking "why" because I have found that the response does little in the face of loss. I have stopped trying to calculate what I think will happen in the future because I have found that the person I am in now can rarely imagine beauty beyond her present limitations. 

So I have settled for unwavering, unrelenting hope. 

Hope is so dangerous. It asks us to move forward when we don't know the way, to trust that all will be well when we plainly see that everything is falling apart. To believe that maybe, just maybe things will turn out better than we ever could have expected. 

But most of all, hope asks us to stay here in the moment, to fully live the life that has been brought to us on any given day. It requires us to keep loving without our beloved, to keep being enchanted by the world around us even if it doesn't include our deepest wishes. 

Even if it doesn't look like we had planned. 

Is this what I thought or even wanted my life to look like at the age of 30?

Of course not.

But each morning I wake up to the sun streaming eons of light through my window, my cat sweetly nudging me out of sleepiness to feed her, and the sound of my roommate shuffling about in the room next to mine as she readies for day. I am greeted with coffee and cold winds and crowded trains, the gesture of a stranger giving up her seat for someone who really needs it, today of all days.  The friendly smile of the security guard as I arrive at work, the quiet of my office and the familiarity of this space that has held so many secrets, so many sorrows, so much time filled with connection and joy and... 

hope.

It follows, even as it wells up within me, and it never lets me go. 

This is what it means to stay alive, to remain awake in a world that tells us to distance and downsize and defend against everything that makes us vulnerable. 

We are so afraid to be vulnerable. 

Yet, if falling in love taught me anything, it is this:

We must remain open even when it hurts because THIS is where the healing begins. 

And the truth is, the more we love, the more love we let in. Just because I lost someone it does not mean that the love we had is dead. I know this because my own heart is very much beating in the midst of missing someone I cared for deeply, and that love will always be mine to hold. To give, maybe even more than before. 

So. I am thankful for the in-between, for the what has been and the what is to come, for the fullness of this minute, this instant happening all around and through me. I am grateful I don't know the answers or the questions or the reasons why because it is in the absence of that control that I am free.

I am healing, yes.

But I am also hoping. 

I am letting my imagination run wild in the face of uncertainty. 

And this, this is what it means to love.

To show up, bloodied and bruised, but not broken.

To offer our heart because without it, we aren't really living.

To believe that no matter what is taken away, love will always remain.

And that is enough to keep showing up, to keep hoping, to keep loving...

today.