Sometimes, you know that hurt is coming, and you’ve got time to shore up your defenses and get yourself ready for the inevitable.  You can put on your big girl panties, get solid with yourself and say (in your best Kathleen Turner voice) “i’m ready when you are”.

More often, you get blindsided, wiped off your feet, taken by surprise.  And while life whirls on around you, you sit there on our ass, dazed and confused, shaking your head and wondering what the fuck you’re supposed to do with the brand new gaping hole in your chest.

It goes so well with all the other junk, you eventually realize.  I’ll just wrap it up a little (so it’s not so obvious) and tuck it away back here.  It will fit nicely somewhere between this ache, and that cynicism, and the exquisitely painful memory of the summer the ground gave way beneath your feet.

Then you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go back into the world – hoping to hell that the others won’t pay too close attention to the clusterfuck that once was your heart.

~~~

Tonight I sat in a trendy wine bar, across from a woman who I knew to be my friend.  Not an old friend, but already a dear one.  Our connection had been quick and easy from the start, and I felt a meaningful and deepening bond.

She sat there and talked to me, laughed with me, and looked me in the eye.  And then, after a half glass of wine to build her strength, she confessed.

“I like you as a friend.  I enjoy our time together.  But I’m seeing Sam”.

She could answer the when (around Thanksgiving) and the how (Facebook), but she didn’t even come close to answering why.  Why did he seek her out? Why did she let it start?  Why did they both decide to keep it a secret for two months?

So I walked out of the bar, leaving my Sauvignon Blanc on the round wooden table next to my friend, along with one more piece of my heart.

~~~

Karma is a bitch.

That’s what I’m thinking as I walk at a fast clip down the busy city street.  It is cold, and my tears are stinging my cheeks.  The air burns my lungs, and I want it to.  I want something else to hurt for a change. My heart needs a break.  I imagine them together in the home I helped design and build, in the bed we once shared.  My friend.  My husband.  It’s too much.  I’m being premature and irrational. I think my head is going to explode.

This is what I get, for what I did to him.  For my lack of integrity when it mattered, for my betrayal.

This is how it comes full circle.

But still, out of all the girls in this city, why did he have to choose her?

~~~

The loss of the night is hitting me on multiple levels, and I want to run fast and hard.  I feel like a fucking fool.  You don’t keep a secret for two months unless you know that you’re doing something you shouldn’t.  All of a sudden, his inability to meet my eyes when he picks up the girls seems much more understandable.  I’m vacillating between fury and heartache and I can’t decide which emotion to dive into.

My cell phone is vibrating inconstantly.  She is calling over and over again.  I push Reject. Reject. Reject. Reject. Reject….ten more times before the phone is silent.

I’m crying and raging and walking and walking and walking.  I think I could walk for hours tonight, feeling everything and nothing all at once.

You see, despite the complete incongruity of tonight’s announcement, I knew.  It made no sense in the context of my knowledge or awareness, but I knew.  The instinct burned fire in my gut from the moment I got the text requesting an in-person audience.  I didn’t want to know.  But I knew.  And I still didn’t put on my big girl panties.

~~~

I yearn for blind optimism, for naiveté, for the belief that everything really will be all right.  Instead, I’m making friends once again with numbness, cynicism, and all the other skeptical emotions that love to stand in for unresolved hurt.

And it does hurt, you know.  Even when you are the one who walked away (sometimes, especially when you’re the one who walked away). When you love someone, give yourself to them; believe wholeheartedly in the forever you built – the absence of that reality always hurts.  It is a confusing thing, when you make decisions based on a dream of wholeness, to find yourself simply left with a new and different void.

Sometimes the only peace available must come from the acknowledgement that wholeness is a thing of the past. From understanding that regret is not always the domain of those who have made mistakes. From accepting that this patched up, knocked around, irreparably cracked and flawed soul of mine is what it is, and of it – the best must be made.

~~~

She holds me, once again tonight, as I cry.  Her heart has a seemingly limitless capacity for expansion.  She is completely present for me, even as I grieve this thing, colliding head on with all my unsettled emotions for him.

It has not been an easy year for us.  We spent more of it growing apart than we did growing together, but there has been a shift lately.  A reawakening of partnership, of shared purpose, of commitment to each other and our future.  This night reminds me again what I already know.

I love her.

With this scarred, mixed up, pulled in a million directions heart, I love her.  It’s not the simple, youthful love of one who has not done battle – it’s cynical, and skeptical and unfortunately rough and raw and hard in places.  But it is love.  It is real.  And it has space to become and grow and change.  It is both reality and potential, and more importantly, it is now.

Maezen says to hold your hands out in front of you, wiggle your fingers and remember that this space you can touch is all there is.  All of reality, all that exists, right here in the space around you.  I do that now and realize that from my computer I cannot reach her.

So, given all the lessons I’ve learned in this crazy life, I know that the only smart thing to do is turn off the computer, go to our bed, wrap myself in her arms and let the blessings of my reality lull me to sleep.