I'm now a Junior at New York University studying Economics and Biology...
Again, it's one of those really late nights in my dorm room, I'm sitting in front of my computer feeling the tickle of nausea in the pit of my stomach as the loaf of French baguette drizzled with truffle oil work itself through my gastronomic system. Bleh, I love food a little too much for my own good.
So much has happened in the last two years... how could I ever begin?
I've traveled... I went to Paris one Spring break, Miami for another... was in China for the better part of last summer and spent the rest of my breaks lounging in my hometown Seattle. Beyond that, there are those occasional, random trips to San Francisco, Boston, Philly, Vancouver, Portland... you get the idea.
I finally fell out of love with a man that I have loved for almost seven years.
Strange?
Perhaps.
Think of your first love. The boy who you saw across the room one day freshman year in high school. He wasn't anything special to the rest of the world, but as I looked at him, all the way across the room... I saw us building a life together. At that moment, I told myself if I ever let myself love him... well, that's gonna be it.
Then there was the three crazy years. We got to know each other. We became close, but I kept my walls up because I was never completely certain of him. He told me he loved me, I was ecstatic... but too terrified to tell him that I loved him too. He told me he loved me since the day he met me... I began to believe him, but I was so scared, I loved him so much that it hurts. I said nothing. He was hurt, I think. He began to pay attention to all the girls that flirt with him, I got irritated, he got defensive. We began to drift apart.
Right before he left for college, he told me again that he loved me. But by then, I didn't believe him.
But I loved him. I never stopped loving him. I think to this day I still carry pieced of him inside of me. Sometimes when I wake up with the sun caressing my face, I would remember the way it felt when he stood near me and I could feel the warmth of his body radiating around me, embracing me without laying a finger upon my skin. I miss his green eyes, his smile, the way his forehead crinkle when he's worried. I even miss his gentle teasing and the little jokes he used to play on me. But most of all, I miss the way he would look at the most abstract of my paintings and know at once what they are... what I am. I have never felt as safe as when I did in his embrace, the smell of his skin all around me. When I think of his love, I think of the summer and the ocean and the feeling being young and so certain of at least one thing in my life.
So I carried those traces of him with me to college. As I fooled around with boys, I thought of him. I walked around endless parties and bars hoping to find someone just like him. I never did. One night, I thought I saw him across the room, my heart stopped and for a moment I couldn't breathe. I stood rooted to my ground staring at that vision. But that was all it was, a vision. As he turned, it was at once apparent that this man was nothing like my love. It felt like my heart broke all over again. That night I sat in the shower crying until four in the morning, when I finally stumbled out of the bathroom, I opened the window to my 31st floor apartment and sat my legs dangling in the morning breeze. In a drunken stupor, I watched the sun climb over the East River in the most stunning display of fire and all I could think of was how easy it would be to just let myself fall.
I couldn't.
One night, when my best friend told me that he loved me, all I felt was my heart screaming that it wasn't right. I wished with all my heart that night that I could have said to him that I loved him too, but I couldn't. All of my heart was stuck in that little glass vial holding the slivers of my high school love.
After a drunken night on the Hudson, I went home with a friend and as we held each other in the shower I felt the haze of tequila sliding from my brain. All at once, I knew I felt nothing for this man before me. All at once, I thought of the way my high school love used to hold me and how completely different it was from the embrace I am it now. All I wanted at that moment then was to just walk away, leave and never come back.
So nights like that goes on, by the dozens. I try to forget them. I go on my 15 mile runs and do my yoga and dance. I can laugh through the pain of the concrete crashing against my foot but I cannot help but cry for my own stupidity in losing the only person that has ever made me really feel.
Just writing about him brings back those feelings that I thought I had lost... I wonder if I'll ever be completely free of him...
I woke up one morning a few weeks ago with the sun coming through the window and I felt my entire self completely relaxed. It's as if that little glass vial had finally broken and those slivers melted into the cracks in my heart. I laid there in my bed staring out the window feeling the happiness wash over me. I remembered him again, but this time not with pain but with a sense of gentle nostalgia for something beautiful that I've misplaced and in time, lost. All at once, I realize how much I have put my life on hold because of that stagnant love I couldn't let go of. What was once beautiful had slowly withered and rotted away in me until its poison crept through my veins and I was no more than a shell... It was a sad existence.
Since then, I've decided to live again. I am in New York City, for god's sake. To live fully here would be to live fully in the world. There's so much I could be doing. I need to live my life.
Our Deepest Fear
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine.
We were born to make manifest the glory that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
~Mariane Williamson
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