Two Things About Christmas Scrabble

 

For the most part, I'm not pining. I'm looking forward to turning the entire apartment into a nest for the coming snowstorm, feeling cozy and self-contained.

But taking down the Christmas tree the other night had me close to panic. The lights were on there so tightly and so tangled that I had to cut off some of the branches to get the lights off. It made me feel trapped, nauseous, and scared, like I was the one bound and tangled up, absolutely NOT in a good way. 

Even after I had the lights off the tree, I considered just throwing them out because they were SO hard to untangle. I got them apart and put away, not as neatly as I would've liked, but they're out of sight.

I felt a lot of anger and fear during all that untangling, but I also felt just good old fashioned love and grief. I've been having the nicest time flirting with new folks and going to the correct door, but I still have to acknowledge that Christmas with TGNS was a big deal.

So, two things:

***He spelled the word "Wholes" during Scrabble and that's what I felt like we were, just for that moment. Wholes is what you have to both be to have the kinds of relationships I want to have, and we weren't that. But just for a little while, a few sparks of time, we were Wholes.

***He and I sang together. The best part of King of Carrot Flowers: "Than he could dare to tryyyy, ah ah ah ay ay, ah ah ah ay ay." We sang it together and it was so beautiful. Our voices matched and our souls chimed. I loved the moments when I could let down my guard and sing in front of him, and I think he liked those times too.

Of course then Latto's Big Energy came on and made me sheepish, made me hope nobody was paying as much attention to the words as I always do.

Knotty Thursday: Figure 8 Knot and Tiny Steps Forward

 

(Note: the first draft of this post was a little more chill, but I’m in the middle of watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind so, yeah.)

It’s hard to find any hope about love. I’m impatient for the grief to be over, but about once a day, it sirens out. If it’s too close to work time, I just talk it through—I call BFF-Formerly-Sweetie and have Ten Minutes of Sadness. She listens to me loop though the whys and what ifs and whats nexts.

But if there’s enough time before work, I wail. Wail and drive or wail from under the weighted blanket or next to my In Full Bloom flowers-of-the-world thousand piece puzzle. The sadness wails out from my guts, harsh but self-loving, excruciating but productive.

It comes from my guts because that’s where my soul lives, and my soul has lost one of its dearest mates. The Shy One sent me off in search of My Person, but that’s just not how I’m built. I belong to him, as much as I belong to the rest of the characters in this story. As much as I belong to the spring azaleas or the Hope Diamond or the cats.

Someday, with distance and time that belonging-to-him will feel safe again, and I’ll love things for the way they were, not for how we wished they could be. Grace. Forward motion. Lavish and abundant and loud and beautifully vexing love with someone or someones who fit. But my soul says not yet. My soul whispers “come back” like a prayer.

Maybe The Shy One’s soul was only meant for one mate. Maybe that’s the unbridgeable ocean between us. It’s not for me to know.

For now, tiny steps toward the brazen and sexy person I was when he met me. One knot a week, and then back to my puzzle and my soothing movie podcasts. I’m proud of this knot, little and ordinary but infinite.

 

Song of the Week: Stop!

Okay, I'm not sure what making a fool out of love entails, but I sure loved dancing to this at new wave night last night and it makes me feel like last week's soul retrieval was kind of real.