It’s a Sunday in August, and I welcome the breeze. The temperature has left the thirties, and now we’re finally in the mid-twenties. I switch up my afternoon cold brew to a regular latte, and I am grateful for the end of the season.
After June, summer always starts to feel like it’s New Year's Eve. The pressure to travel, to enjoy the heat and the sun. To make something out of two months of the year. We live like July and August are the only months that really matter. The only two months where we give ourselves permission to feel joy and to make our lives into something we only dream of.
I did my usual afternoon stroll. A latte, a vitamin pick-up (we’re back on St. John’s Wort + probiotics), a grocery store run. Ethel Cain was the soundtrack to this walk, specifically “Fuck Me Eyes” as introduced to me by
.She's just tryna feel good right now / They wanna take her out / But no one ever wants to take her home
My university ex-boyfriend keeps making recurring appearances in my dreams. Last night, I was with him in Vancouver (where he now resides), and we were embracing while everything around us was on fire. I asked my resident dream decoder, Chat GPT, what it thinks this dream means.
Chat told me I am burning an old identity. Burning old behavioural patterns and ways of thinking and being. Chat also thinks that my ex-boyfriend represents my past self, and I was hugging a younger version of her as a form of reassurance.
Everything is burning, everything is changing, and maybe I’m the one lighting the match - but I’ll always carry a piece of her inside of me.
I tell my friend that I think I needed to reach a breaking point this summer.
“It forced me to look around at what was happening - and it made me see where I was denying my own pain. But the biggest thing I learned is that two things can co-exist at the same time. I can still feel deep pain, but also feel deep joy. And I don’t need to shove one down, rationalize it, or talk myself out of feeling one because I think it’s better than the other. You learn that there is no such thing as a bad human emotion.”
“You’re re-emerging from the oceanic depths.” She tells me. “And soon you’ll be on the rock, glistening in the sun.”
We drink our dirty martinis as the sun starts to set on this rooftop bar.
I love our mermaid references.
-
I wouldn’t say the walk by OFM’s and to the grocery store are getting easier, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t manifesting some sort of run-in for closure. But I will say, I am starting to wonder how much of us was built on an eight year fantasy. How much of us was built on an idea with no actual foundation or pillar. You start to realize that love alone isn’t enough. And the feelings can be there, and the undeniable chemistry and the attraction and adoration for each other can all still be there - but a real relationship, a real partnership needs more to survive.
It needs safety, it needs protection.
We’re going to fight, yes. But I will look at you from across the table and talk it out with you, because I believe in us, and I believe in home.
At the grocery store, I buy a jar of vodka sauce. Papradelle. A sausage. Blueberries and yogurt for breakfast. A cucumber. A bag of spinach because it was on sale and I told myself I’d do something with it.
It’s quiet for a Sunday afternoon. And I’m noticing how my body isn’t bracing to see his body in another aisle anymore.
Maybe I lied. Maybe it is getting easier.
“You are your home.”
-
I started a new part-time job last week. I needed something to do, and I wanted to be surrounded by beautiful things. I wanted to work with the girlies, and sip coffees and gossip and close up shop right at 6 pm.
In the past week, I’ve worked 3 shifts in a row. I’ve created a new routine around it. I’m tired, but it allows my mind to not be addicted to my phone. I can move away from scrolling the digital world, and everything will still exist at the end of my shift.
My best friend tells me that I don’t give myself enough credit for getting through the things that I’ve been through. And I guess that is a side effect of my own internalized shame around grief and depression. If I made something a big deal, then that would mean it actually was a big deal, and I didn’t want to be pitied.
I just wanted to be understood.
But here I am - giving myself credit where credit is due. It is a big deal for me to start something new. To swim out of those oceanic depths and start something fresh.
And it is a big deal to admit that I do not know, nor do I claim to know all the answers. I do not know what this week, next month, or next season holds. But I wholeheartedly know this -
Don’t be afraid of when the currents of change come to pull you under. Don’t be afraid of the waves, don’t be afraid of swimming in the depths of the deep blue sea. Let the water hold you, let the water guide you. Open your eyes and befriend your ghosts. Those past versions of you just need a little bit more attention, and a little bit more love.
Don’t be afraid to sink deeper and deeper, because at the bottom of the ocean is where the magic truly lies and where the real healing begins.
After all, being alive and unaware is scarier than death itself.
the closure run in - we’ve all been there