This memoir would haunt me…continuously in my mind and I continuously tried to push it to the back. It was too painful to solidify the truth like this in black and white…my childhood, my addiction, my love story. My ego hated the idea of looking like a “dumb bitch” for a man (excuse my French, s’il vous plaît, but it’s the truth). Plus, I had no idea where I was going with this. Would it be a romantic story of true love winning? And if not, then what was my point??
“I write best when I am either falling in love or falling apart,” Rudy Francisco.
I was neither falling in love nor apart. I was in some bizarre space in between…some weirdly quiet jolting between hope and purgatory…
If Time were a roller coaster this is when she would be climbing towards the main peak…accelerating slowly, attempting to defy gravity…torturingly building momentum…only to drop you into some ordered type of chaos…until…until the final event that would brutally stop Time’s inertia in its tracks…thereby forcing this memoir forth.
(The roller coaster is already too perfect a metaphor to attempt to find a more clever one. Also, side note, I don’t like them anymore.)
~
I never wrote him again.
I had some growing understanding of how wrong this was becoming for me. When he was there, there was no place in the world more meant for me than with him, but he was there less and less. And when dealing with the other “him,” I had an overwhelming knowing that there was nowhere I belonged less than where “he” was. I would second guess myself often though. Especially when I would come back to face this memoir from time to time…
Our love story was the most meaningful one of my life up to that point, and I loved it (for the most part). I loved the falling in love with him part of our story and the making love and the floating away together in Our Universe and the talking about meaningful things (meaningless too for that matter) for hours upon hours. The dreams and signs and Henry and so many other synchronicities…why would all these things be experienced if it wasn’t ‘meant to be?’ I could come to no logical conclusion at the time.
It’s true, my life story now unfolds in the following way…before him, after “him.” Before meeting him, I may have secretly loved love, but my heart was still cold and closed to almost everyone. There was barely one person on this planet that I fully trusted and she was gone.
There were a few lingering beliefs in me that needed to be brought to light…questions hanging out in the shadows that I finally found worth asking…if the one person who was supposed to love you and was biologically wired to do so, couldn’t…who could? If you can’t trust your own mother, who could you trust??
I can answer these questions readily now, though the path to getting there was a brutal one that took decades…between the years running from it with drugs and alcohol and other things, to the years trying desperately to work it out with the source (to no avail), and the years of purposefully digging it out at the roots (which ran deeeeeeeeeeeeep)…
Primarily, there is only one…One person I need to love. One person I need to trust…if I can love me, trust me…I can love anyone and I can see that which is trustworthy much easier. And I do mean these words to their fullest capacity and potential…unconditional love, unconditional trust. As a result, making me more useful to those I love and all of humanity really (in a roundabout way). If someone else on my path loved me or was worthy of trust…the cherry on top.
So, it seems AA is right again…you can’t give what you haven’t got, but to get it feels almost magical (though it’s far from magic)…to see it in another, even better. To give it away, so that you can keep it…divine…actually out of this world…
I am the first garden I need to care for.
I used to think it was my heart that “he” was breaking, but my heart doesn’t feel broken anymore. It feels rather mysteriously unbreakable (did you think Bruce Willis too?). Everything that blocked my heart is what was breaking…fear, ego, self-deception, wounds. His love both thawed and broke the chains around my heart…thawing in part just by becoming aware of his sheer existence, but also because I allowed this love story. The exact moment I collided into him was the exact time the chains had been readied to corrode anyway…he was the final catalyst, and it was simply time.
“The road that stretches before the feet of a man is a challenge to his heart long before it tests the strength of his legs,” Thomas Aquinas.
Unless I go backwards (and that’s not an option), my heart will remain open. This I know to be true.
Before him, I had no idea what kind of lover I was or what I wanted out of romantic love. Sure, there were some generic ideologies that I had picked up along the way, but I had little depth of experience. After “him,” though, I understand my worth as a lover and am sure of what I do not want.
Love…a simple word with delicately complex consequences as a verb…much greater than romance, though romantic love is certainly worth considering…
I have found that as a lover (in every sense), I seem to be on a path to becoming an ultimate one. I say this with no delusion. I believe that at the core, we are all ultimate lovers. Love is not blind. Self-deception is. I have been both. I have seen the ugliest parts of a man and loved him still, as I have seen the ugliest parts of myself and loved them too. As a lover, I will not lie to make you feel better. Love understands the fleeting nature of feelings. Beyond feelings, love wants what is ultimately best and will tell the truth (like Betsy did with me). Always. As a lover, I can now see another in their entirety and love them anyway, as I have done with myself. I will tell the truth no matter what, because that’s what love does and because I have been able to do that with myself. Mostly thanks to the grace shown to me when I didn’t deserve it…
(See, I tried to write about romantic love, but I couldn’t keep it that contained. I don’t know what that’s about…maybe because there is only one fundamental love).
Agape…highest form of love, charity.
It has occurred to me recently that I could very well be alone, in the romantic and sexual sense, for the rest of my days after this love story…this realization comes with a twinge of sadness, but mostly acceptance (surprisingly for such a romantic). I never set out to be a nun, but here we are.
I love unconditionally but will only be with another in relationship now under certain conditions…transparent one’s. Transparency is a hard one for humans (I get it), but too underrated, I think. How else could you feel free with another and not caged? Do we not all salivate at the mouth from the thought of freedom?? I desire nothing more.
I’m no math whiz, but I’m pretty sure this is a universal equation: Love + Truth = Freedom.
I am unable to settle anymore as my soul screams in disagreement…“Give me liberty or give me death!” Patrick Henry.
~
A few months of therapy later…I turned in my 2 weeks’ notice, accepted a new job that allowed me to cut out all outside care of my child, and I began to put some boundaries in place in my relationship. I was going to live a life worth living or I would die trying.
Poquito a poquito…brick by brick.
In Bloom 
I remember that place…I did this thing with a girl (yes we were both 16), and something funny happened, she got pregnant. Go figure. We got married and had been married for 26 years and I thought I was in love. Got divorced and thought I was dying. But life being as it is showed me something that I had never touched before…I ‘fell’ in love with the most lovely lady I had ever met. This was beyond love. Never an argument, not a wobble anywhere, I was in heaven. But…as life does…I wasn’t in a position at that time to truly support her so I became that wobble. So it ended…I thought I was dying from losing that love the first time…the second killed me. It had touched that inner fear, that rejection from my dad, that love I felt he would never give me, ever wanted but left empty. And it took me back to find that. This world wants us to find that love…our love, and it is in behind that fear. We don’t want to be hurt so we close our heart over…in pain…and in blocking others so they don’t touch that pain. It is ever why we put those expectations on others…don’t treat me that way, love me like this, don’t do this or that…so that we don’t ‘feel’ that pain. But what we don’t understand, and remember we are an immature child when this occurs, is that those we love and look up to are passing on ‘their’ fears unintentionally to us. They haven’t resolved their own fears so how can they pass on the ‘answer’ to their actions, they know no other way. And to prove this…look at yourself over the years, your pain, your doubts…your very actions have also passed these onto your children, those around you. IT IS MEANT TO HAPPEN. It must or how else will you understand unconditional love. You must experience all those conditions those fears place on us…but…slowly, and I mean slowly we gain an understanding, we gain an empathy, compassion and love to finally ask of ourselves ‘why?’. And in that pain finally go looking to understand why we can’t have that love, that happiness we know is there…we always look for it, in everything. And keep blaming us in those fears that there is something wrong with us. But down inside it is waiting for us to do what we feel is the undo’able. Go into that painful place, that place of tears and pain and hurt…and understand why. I’ve gone there so many times but it wouldn’t speak to me, leaving it clamped over my heart. But one day I asked myself the question I had missed, the feeling I had truly hidden so hard and fast…I actually told myself I had looked, when in fact I had skimmed across…often. I DIDN’T WANT TO SEE OR ADMIT THAT IT EVEN EXISTED. But at a moment in time, when it was time I asked myself how did that moment make me feel, what was I really afraid of…and I touched it. It broke something so powerful that the weight of the world dropped away, my whole sense of being was stripped bare…and I could finally see. See that it all had a purpose, all was showing me something so profound that each and every step was getting me ready for this moment so that I would understand unconditional love…my love…the one I had kept at bay forever. I cried for so long, but this wasn’t the tears of pain but the beauty of understanding…the beauty of that meeting of that love and happiness we all ever look for…was always waiting inside us to dare its path. We must experience so much, so that we can see. Must understand that we ever go looking for that love in another…when it is ours that we are missing. Must realize that as that child we have been in fact given a great beauty in that misunderstanding, so that we can finally understand and see something beyond words. We see it in our children, trying to comprehend this world just as we did, so we explain it gently even among so many tears. And love will do the same to us, give it to us slowly, touching us in so many ways, so that we will understand it fully when our time is right. It is always with us in that empathy, compassion and love through those experiences in life that we find…just waiting for us to allow that love for us, that moment when it will open us to what we have ever waited for. And as time has gone by I realized that whenever I put and expectation on anything, my fears have not been fully resolved. It isn’t until I am at peace within myself that the rest of the world doesn’t matter. Not ‘doesn’t matter’ as in I don’t care…but that it is going where it needs to…I don’t ‘need’ to do anything, anymore. So much so that the need to be loved in a relationship in anyway is no longer there, just an openness, an acceptance of me…and what I now give out, naturally, unequivocally…just me. Not selfishly but one of now being so open that it includes…everything. No picking or choosing this or that but truly being open to it all. In gaining that understanding, I let it go…all of it. Just like every other understanding we’ve made down here. This entire journey is just that, an acceptance in that understanding. You have learned much in your understanding Samantha, and yes many times it comes back up to tap you on the shoulder. But as time goes by your acceptance of it and the you, you have become, is showing a love like no other ❤️🙏🏽
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I get this, Mark. The beauty of it all does bring tears to my eyes. I feel that now too…just generally open and accepting. The first time I experienced acceptance, I knew that’s what it was IN the moment it happened. It wasn’t a conscious choice. It just happened naturally as a result of not resisting the way life was unfolding anymore (after a very long time of fighting). And it was amazing. To know that no matter the chaos that surrounds me, peace can exist even then…unbelievable. “The gift of desperation…” To read about it is one thing. To experience it, another…Thank you ❤
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