I feel torn in two.
There is a piece of me that wants more than anything to think that I'm going to fall in love again. And there is a part of me that is screaming that I can never, never fall in love again.
It's just lovely.
This is a hard thing to admit, but I'm trying to be brave. I honestly thought when I got divorced that I would just love Nick forever. That it wouldn't matter that he had moved on, and that he definitely didn't love me anymore, I would just live forever the way that I had prior to meeting Nick-certain that he was the love of my life.
I don't think that anymore. I think that's probably fairly obvious from what I write.
Letting go of the idea that I love Nick was a tangle of its own emotions. That's basically what the blog was about in the past year. Opening myself up to the idea that there could be a human being that I care about possibly even more than Nick-there are days that feels like the most wonderful idea ever, and there are days that I think if I don't shut down all of my emotions right now all of this is going to lead to sure hurt.
Grief is such a strange beast, coming and going and hitting me when I least expect it, and it sort of feels as if I'm standing on a mountain and I keep climbing but I'm never quite sure that I'm not just about to slip and fall and get hurt all over again.
I do wonder at the consequences of allowing myself to fall to such a scary place-will I ever be able to not be scared of being abandoned? I have created such walls within me, I'm not sure that they can ever be knocked down. On the one hand, that seems good-it seems more adult, more sensible. Not to dwell on it, but my marriage had many, many glaring warning signs that I chose to ignore, for reasons that I understand but that are not healthy in the least.
On the other hand, that seems lonely.
It's such a dance-figuring out how much of this is about figuring out things about myself, and how much of it is about allowing someone new in. I don't want to mess it up. I don't want to undo all of the work that I've done to get to this point.
There is a feeling that comes of someone having your back that cannot be replicated even with the genuine joy that comes of standing on your own two feet.
I had forgotten that.
When you are the only one to do all the things, you simply go about doing them. In the beginning, you remember what it felt like for there to be two adults, but for me, in the past two and a half years, I have just gotten used to carrying in all the groceries and doing all the cleaning and all the laundry and helping with the homework and just all of the bits and pieces that go into being a grownup. This is not to say that my girls don't help-they definitely do, and I would be lost without them. But they are kids still, and reliant on me to keep it together.
I found myself telling someone last week that I worry that people look at me like I have some sort of strength, like I manage to keep the girls and myself alive and fed and what have you, and if they only knew how scared and confused and worried I am, they would lose all respect for me. And, of course, as the words were leaving my lips, I realized how vain I sounded. Likely anyone who knows me from reading this blog realized long ago that I don't have any idea what I'm doing, and that I'm fumbling along this path much at my own peril.
For now, for right this minute, I'm going to hold onto the joy that I'm feeling, and try my best not to overthink every second of my life. In the end, I may get hurt, and I may fall all over again, but it's a chance I have to take if I don't want to just stay stuck on the side of the mountain forever.
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