Sweat clung to the cocktail glass.
A single tear of perspiration slid to the damp napkin, joining moisture from the previous gin and tonic.
The naked midday sun-exposed itself to the empty patio I sat in, squeezing more tears from the glass. The world was at work. I was at work trying to forget.
I unknowingly swirled a pair of black straws around the lip of the glass, my hand working freely from my head. It would need the practice as alcohol worked its way to my brain. I wanted it to work faster.
I needed it to work faster.
Checking my watch I squinted. Not from blurry vision. That hadn’t happened yet. But from confusion.
I’d been officially divorced for just over two hours. Two hours. It felt like an eternity. It felt like a dream. It felt like the life I once had was more imagination than realization. Something I’d dreamed. A lucid memory of a fabricated existence.
Ice clinked like marbles as I took a long swallow, relieving the glass of half its contents. The waitress walked outside, adjusting the chalk-written menu, hoping the tweaked angle would catch the eye of more business. I waved to her with a lazy wrist, motioning to my half-empty glass. I’d need another. And by the time she came out with the new round, I’d be done with the old.
Done with the old, ready for the new.
It’s what I told myself I required. To forget, to move on, to cross out and write over what came before, something new needed to come along.
Hopefully sooner rather than later.
The Desire To Replace
When something ends, there’s a desire to replace. When a vehicle stops working correctly it’s swapped out for another. When a phone’s battery fails to maintain a charge, the desire to invest in something new is strong. It’s an upgrade. It’s better than what’s before.
Some treat relationships the same way.
At the conclusion of a relationship, when there’s no more track and it’s run its course, there’s often a desire to keep moving. To hop onto the next relationship train and see where it goes.
Because moving is better than standing still, right?
I’ve fallen into that trap. At the end of my marriage, I needed something else. Something to distract me, to take me away. I needed a travel agent for my broken heart. Lost souls need guidance from time to time, don’t they?
And while any other relationship would take me away, they didn’t always take me in the direction I wanted to go. Stepping into a new relationship with a damaged heart is like going for a drive with closed eyes. Where you want to go and where you end up are often two different locations.
I felt I could replace what I’d lost. It was that simple. The loss of love doesn’t leave a defined opening in one’s being. It’s shapeshifting, and nothing will ever perfectly fit what no longer remains.
For a long time, I focused on course correction. On finding a new relationship. A better one. One that would prove to myself that I was worth it.
Eventually, I came to find I very much was worth it. But not from any other new relationship.
It came from myself.
Your Most Important Relationship is You
I’m not sure how many times I’ve heard someone proclaim they are, “dating themselves,” but every time I nearly broke my optic nerve at the severity of the eye roll.
And while the phrasing may not do much for me, it’s the concept that does.
The idea of focusing on oneself. On discovering the inner workings of one’s mind, what nourishes the soul, what feeds the heart and pushes the body forward.
There’s a simple yet vital importance to loving oneself. To having a meaningful understanding of what makes you special. Nobody on this planet will ever intimately know you for you. There will always be cracks in what’s shared, both internationally and unintentionally, with even the closest friends and lovers.
The difficulty is understanding and loving oneself doesn’t come with the flip of a switch. You don’t wake up in the morning and fully comprehend everything you’re capable of. It’s the same as any other meaningful relationship. Total comprehension, if it’s even possible, comes about organically. You discover how far you’re able to push yourself, what you’re capable of doing in times of need, how powerful you can become.
Finding a relationship with yourself doesn’t come out of force. It’s like trying to find your car keys. You can look and look and look and come up empty every time. It’s when you stop looking that your keys present themselves to you.
Funny how that works sometimes. As if the universe is waiting for you to be ready to receive. Because just because you want something doesn’t mean you’re ready.
One With Myself
After my divorce, I didn’t know what to do. Like a helium balloon without a string, I floated, no direction, no purpose. At first, I tried to fill the loss with other people, but that did nothing but delay proper healing. Then I swore off dating because I didn’t want to feel anything like I had from the failed marriage, and yet, like a sand trap, the more I tried to move away from it the more it consumed me.
As time crawled by, slower than I would have liked, pain eased and some clarity returned. It’s not that I necessarily wanted to be on my own for months into years into even longer, but my partitioned brain, which had been trying to focus on myself and someone else, could finally fully focus on the most important relationship of all.
The one with myself.
It allowed me to see some of the cracks in my own foundation and, even if I didn’t know how to repair them, I at least knew of the existence of these faults.
Sometimes repairs are easy. Other times, it might take years to discover.
A year ago I set off on a cross-country camper trip with only my dogs. I didn’t have any real plans, essential destinations, or a timeline. Life dealt me cards and I played the best hand I could. At the time I would have told you I knew everything there was to know about myself. I might not have said I loved myself, but I thought I knew what motivated me, what inspired me, and how far I could rely on myself.
A year later I can tell you I didn’t know what I was talking about then. I discovered truly how much I could rely on myself when nobody else was there to lean on. I saw what could push me forward and also areas holding me back.
I didn’t go on the drive to discover any of these things. At the time it felt more like a forced opportunistic necessity. It’s amazing what you can learn about yourself when you’re not looking to learn about yourself.
Love Yourself, There’s Only One You
There are times it can be hard to love yourself. To focus on your own wellbeing. To step away from the dating world or the push to be with someone else. There is very much external pressure to find someone. Whether it’s from relatives or friends or followers posting family pics on social media, there can be this internal sense of failure when lasting relationships don’t materialize, combined with the desire to silence the critics.
But can you really fully open yourself to someone else if you can’t fully open up to yourself?
I have friends and even family members that absolutely must be in a relationship. When one ends there’s the desperate search for another. To find the next life preserver bobbing by. To rely on its ability to keep their head up and avoid drowning. Yet wouldn’t it be better to take time away and learn how to swim? That way they could still hold onto the preserver, and yet know they have the ability to care for themselves.
There are billions of people out there, but there’s only one you. Your relationship with yourself is the most important one you’ll ever have.
So don’t be afraid to step away, discover, and focus on yourself. Because when you do, you, and every other potential relationship, will be so much better for it.
Lovely opening, so visual and tactile, just the way I like to write — and the style I enjoy best, when reading.
Your thoughts and insights are not new to me, though they are a welcome reminder especially now, as I sit on my unfinished porch with my border collie puppy, drinking an Old Fashioned — balanced by a cup of coffee — a in the embracing heat of Florida’s late summer.
I find I cannot adequately share with others the vibrant, verdant beauty that I enjoy every time I sit on this porch, gazing upon a yard overgrown with low, soft vegetation that cannot in the least be called “grass;” they are merely weeds covering the soft, sandy soil. But I love it anyway, in a way that my family cannot understand: I love it because it is *natural.*
Finding such an organic, natural man with sweltering, soft passion that compares to what I’ve known before, that resembles or bests the delicious heat of this tropical clime is beyond difficult; it feels impossible, implausible, purely fantastical. So, as you suggest, I return to myself, to the strong desire to be myself, to understand myself, to nurture myself with writing and reading and indulgences true to myself.
I, too, have come to the conclusion that there is no one who can possibly know me as well as I know myself, no matter how hard anyone else may try — and no one, as yet, has had such aspirations. I cannot understand why, for I find myself most intriguing, as I find so many people, things of nature, and my puppy.
Why, then, am I alone?
I can only guess that it is because those I find most attractive are those who most resemble the man who hurt me most, to whom I gave most of my love for most of my life — and that attraction is yet an attempt to remedy the catastrophe of a marriage steeped in abuse of me, a situation I still cannot emotionally comprehend.
All of this said, I want to thank you for writing this, as I’ve been rather afraid to posit to the world a remedy that I feel has yet so much to go before I am truly, deeply healed, as I have been truly, deeply hurt by people I’ve so profoundly loved.
Keep writing. Your compositions are beautiful.