Saturday was perfect, like a rose-quartz jewel. Today we are like vases full of sea water. We got smashed and all our happy days poured out.
That was my tweet from one year ago, today. Today, right now, almost to the very hour, is precisely one year since Meitar and I broke up. I don’t remember very much from that night, though I remember the days before it with a vivid, surrealist wash of color that almost defies description.
From that night, I remember I went to bed angry. I slept on the living room floor. In all the four years we dated, I had never gone to bed angry before. We made a point of it. Perhaps that was our undoing.
What a year it’s been. Such a year, in fact, that as I sit here at my desk attempting something like nostalgia, very little comes to mind. Somewhere, amidst moving and working and massive personal change, I lost my anger at the whole mixed up mess. I lost a lot of fragility and delicacy and care, which I needed when I was putting myself back together and don’t need now that I am much more whole. What I feel, looking back a year later, is only a vague sense of compassion.
I will probably never tell the full truth on the Internet, I now realize. And I will probably guard the ways in which I speak about this time in my life, for a myriad of reasons that go far beyond one simple messy breakup, that are mostly to do with not wanting to further passive-aggressive behavior within my life. I do not currently subscribe to the public airing of specific grievances, though I have in the past and may in the future.
I have been reading research on happiness, which has been speaking to me of many things I already believed in, such as the possibility of being partially genetically predisposed to a happy mental attitude.
It is a curious thing. Despite being stressed to almost breaking by a dozen different tasks a day, and despite the stagnation of words and paint, and despite my laptop crashing to death last night and taking with it three months of photographs (though not documents, thank goodness), and despite being underslept and over caffeinated, despite all of the still-messy bits of my life, I am content. And beyond that, happy. Happy in a way that makes me laugh for no reason and paint my toenails blue. Happy in a way that builds.
There’s the one-year reflection, the simple truth. And I don’t write very much about my life right now, because what’s there to write, really, when the beginning, middle, and end is just that bloody boring?
Clearly, what’s to write is fiction. I have a writing group again. For joy, for joy, for joy.
Post a Comment