My heart.

I’ve been pondering blog entries for what’s seemed like months. Every time I wanted to spill happiness, something short-lived but dire happened. When the pain came? I found myself supported.  

Contentment. Finally being able to weather the tides and float amongst the debris I had created around me. I wanted so desperately to change, since October. To become an unstoppable force. Someone who would make the mistakes of my dating ways turn around and marvel in what I had become. I struggled, and truthfully- I struggle monthly with bills, and commitments- and making ends meet. Something great always happens every month, I retain my lease, the bills are paid and we are able to make brownies for dessert.  Ironically, this is the happiest I’ve been… ever. I talk to my parents and tell them funny quips before I hang up. There’s no talk of men or the next steps I desperately believed I had to get to before I became something ‘real.’ Maybe that was it. Everyone told me, “Give up the dream, sweetheart.” I tried so desperately to fit in to the mold of what I truly thought I needed to be, that I lost track of what I already had. Clique, but true. We can’t see the things closest to us when we’re too busy looking at the horizon. 

 I used to be busy every night of the week. I miss it at times like this when I’m at work and thinking- my house is ridiculously clean, the laundry is done, (I’m savoring this,) and my child will come home from her Montessori paint-stained and happy. What the crap will I do with myself, tonight? I still have the phantoms that call me- those I went on a date or two with, and we catch up and hang up in solidarity. It’s like we just check in to see if each other is alright, not because we want them, but because while the economy, our bank accounts, and hope is crashing, we’re all still living and breathing. 

I bawled last night. I couldn’t tell you why. It’s been the main source of my contemplation all morning. We watched, “The Life Before Her Eyes,” which I highly recommend if you feel the need to have violent urges screaming things at your television and gripping the couch arm with enough force to kill it. It’s one of those films you don’t understand until about 3 hours later, and you wake up and realize, “My god. That was good acting.”  “Unbreakable,” on steroids, even. My friends will be the first to tell you- I cry at just about everything. But to bawl? Like that? Bre looked at me puzzled and for the first time in a long time, I remember just not wanting him to let me go. It’s the pre-fascination with death, or the fact that a little girl was lost in the movie- and between envisioning my child in the situations and feeling for the main character, I think it was all too much. Maybe it wasn’t the emotion so much as my need- to live and feel everything- trying so hard not to be a zombie, or someone who is carelessly going through the motions of her life. Maybe rather, it was the feeling of waking up- looking around my house, with my arm rested on Bre, and breathing.

There was so much bad after Josh. The car accident, the layoffs, the pain, the fears- the weird bills and everything amounted to me having to surrender all the strength I thought I could maintain and just focus on getting by. I became angry, bitter, sullen, exasperatingly happy, and incredibly tired. I made new friends, a crazy escapeartist/busdriver/fatherextraordinare, and an amazing girlfriend who without her? I wouldn’t get through anything at the un-shiny, un-happy, troughs of hell.   

I think maybe if I can describe it like this- I’ll understand. Sometimes, wanting something so much, makes it powerful, too powerful for any one person to have. Gollum-like, we, (with eyes-straight-ahead,) plow through to make everything happen. We construct molds, we fashion devices, we change ourselves- sacrifice everything for one, main, goal. My heart is powerful in many ways. I thought it was powerful in love, only. And I thought to be the most powerful; it had to love only one person. I stopped investing in others, through the years because I was so damn focused on creating a wall around Ava and myself. Unbreakable- it wasn’t. Instead of investing everything in someone, I threw the pieces outside of myself. I made a life. I volunteer on Tuesdays, and have a Sunday night ritual that just kind of happened and a party once a month, and work, and a home- and friends that call and invest in me as I do them. I am more powerful now, not that power is important whatsoever.

 Our lives are a flicker. A moment in something greater, easily forgotten only if we let them be. In the movie, they stated, “the heart is the strongest muscle.” True strength is not measured by how much you can lift, or the pain in which you can withstand- but the ways in which you recover, and try, try, again.