on grieving and growing

it's a tuesday, and there's thunderstorms

So much has changed. And maybe that’s girlhood and the point of being human - meeting people who either subdue parts of yourself, or lighten parts of yourself.

Weirdly, I always feel like I am looking to be saved. Accepted. And understood. I want more than a conversation that will live in my DMs. Or to be someone’s rebound that will end up in some situationship that will, in a way, shatter some part of me because I know I will be putting up with behaviour I shouldn’t be. I want to be more than a mirror. I want to be more than just someone to project all of their unaccomplished hopes and dreams and wishes on. I want there to be something to sink into. Someone more meaningful and deep, and it doesn’t have to be the forever type, the “one”. But just the type where egos stop getting involved and it’s two people just, and this is going to sound cheesy - laughing on a park bench. Or going to Bellwoods and sitting on a blanket. There’s the city skyline. And maybe we’d order that pepperoni pizza from Blondie’s, and I guess I’d have to settle for canned wine.

Or, there’s Rome. There’s always Rome. And that’s where it gets complicated, isn’t it? Because I have a tendency to go and not come back. And I thought I outgrew it, I did. I really, really did. But there’s always some new opportunity for regrowth, isn’t there? In old places that saw you before anyone else did.

My spiritual friend told me that Rome will always be a lantern for me. A light in the dark. And it’s ironic that I’m mulling a few weeks in Rome over - when I’m realizing that this was OFM’s biggest fear. And it’s in this moment that I realize he was right. I mean, he’s known me for 8 years, after all.

This, I realize is my party 4 u moment. When the music stops, and you realize he never actually took anything from you. The dreams of glass shattering, of you looking for things that you thought you had lost, but you could never find. They were dreams, they were fears, they were probable, but they weren’t alive in this reality. In this version of your story.

It’s a gift, isn’t it? To have bits of your heart everywhere. The price we pay for loving multiple things, and multiple places, at the same time. And having people in multiple places loving you.

I came home from the bar a few weeks ago and needed a hot shower. I stood there and let the water and the steam bury me. I don’t know if it was a culmination of being ignored by someone I had once been intimate with, that feeling of being a woman and never feeling like I was going to win, maybe it was the cheap wine. Or maybe, it was all of it. But I just stood there, let the steam blur my vision, and I wondered what the point of all of it was. And I cried. I cried for all of it.

What I didn’t realize, was that in that very moment, I was changing. And I think I was crying for the girl that was. I was crying for the girl who felt so close to getting her happily ever after. I was crying for the girl who still believed in them. I was crying for the girl who somehow, along the way, convinced herself that everyone who ever loved her would leave her. I was crying for the girl who just needed that adult. Who just needed someone to trust.

Love never looked like how I thought it would.

Love never came in the way I imagined it.

It came from strangers, mostly. It came from shared interests on the internet. Stepping onto airplanes. It came from “What’s your name?” and “Will I see you tomorrow?” The “I miss you” and the “I’ll miss you.” It came from all of the white roses at her funeral. They represented something. Beauty, hope, peace, resiliency. The roses you see everywhere. The lives that were taken too soon, but lessons that live on and on and on. It came from the sea, didn’t it? The old Nonna who makes you a cappuccino, who cups your face in her hands and tells you that you’re beautiful. It came from your sister. From those rooftop sunsets outside of the city. It came from playing in his summer garden, back in 1996. From Nonno’s tomatoes.

Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose.

I can’t feel what she’s telling me. Is she telling me to go or to stay? For how long?

I want to ask.

I think back to that dream where I had spilled tomato juice all over myself and I asked her why she didn’t tell me that I made a mess.

And her response?

“Why would I tell you? That’s just who you are.” With the biggest smile on her face.

Nothing feels the same, does it? And isn’t that the beauty of it all?

To live, to grieve, to let go, to grow. To follow our hearts back to where it all really began.

And to where our hearts, truly, never left.

I love you. Let’s talk again soon.

Emily