Monday, June 7, 2010

Back in Time

I'm eating dinner on the coffee table again. The major step forward is I'm using a placemat. And it's a different coffee table, not the one I had for almost 12 years, square, stained pine. This is an elegant cousin, dark wenge-like wood, circular, organic.
Forgiving.
I'm alone again. I'm not surprised, or really that hurt (not as much as I have been) but I am just the slightest bit bereft by this turn of events. Everything happened so quickly, really. But it's okay. I drew the alone card a long time ago. When I decided, somewhere around the age of perhaps fifteen, that I was not going to be able to participate 'fully' in the milestones and markers of adult life. I just lived too far inside my own head. Time passed, I came out a bit, I made a life for myself, one with lots of sociability; it's just that pieces were still missing, things I didn't want that everyone else wanted.

I had a message 'conversation' with a long-ago ex and I talked to him about being alone again and how perplexing it was on the one hand, and on the other hand, achingly familiar. He was, in his way (so familiar with the complexities of my personality) reassuring; there's a difference, Carolyn, to being alone and being okay with it. He's right. I look around at my place in the world, my little life, my little condo, the huge base of people I am lucky enough to love, and everything does feel right.
Saturday night was my first event out as a singleton again. I was in a group of 14 people; 6 married couples, myself, and one other singleton, a male friend. I realized, as I sat at dinner (my two best friends had positioned themselves on either side of me--my protectors; making sure this night, a night without "him" was more than okay, that it was FABULOUS); and I felt more loved than I had in the whole last year of my relationship.

True friends can do this for you.

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