"The ball's in your court." We began the phone call as a couple and ended the phone call, along with our relationship, with those words. In that moment, I felt relief. It was as if he had given his consent. I had permission to be free. It would grow to be a phrase that would haunt me in coming years. As an individual who has always found difficulty in commitments and decision making, he said the words that could hurt the most. There would be times when I occasionally found myself preoccupied with other tasks and the phase would leach into my brain like a poison. I shrugged it off. I cried. I regretted the choice I had made for the both of us. Then I would sob. In my moments of weakness I would reach out to him and he would furtively remind me of my scars, my shortcomings, my many weaknesses, all of the reasons that I was unworthy of being loved. Like putting pressure on a fractured piece of mirrored glass, pressing your finger snugly over the ruptured smoothness and pressing down until the glass crumbles beneath the stress, he attempted to further break the broken pieces of my heart.
Such is the freshness of a morning sunrise, I found myself in a new relationship. I held enough baggage to be featured on an episode of "Hoarders." I was scared. I was ready to run at the first sign of failure, but bit by bit this new love taught me to let go. He taught me what I needed and made me feel safe. He taught me that I didn't need to be worthy of love because he would love me anyway, unconditionally. For the first time in my life, I was wanted just as I was with no expectations other than to love him in return. This is true freedom. All at once my checkered past, my insufficiencies, and my insecurities were no longer a prison holding me back from what I could be capable of doing. It was then that I realized that even if this relationship also failed, I'd be okay just loving myself.
They say time heals all wounds, but in my case no amount of time could have healed me the way unconditional love has healed me. If anything, time would have only made the wounds fester and grow systemic. This new man, he wasn't my first love, but he will forever be my last love. My favorite human.
If you are feeling lonely and broken, be brave. Because sometimes when a person presses a finger over a broken piece of glass in an attempt to destroy it, the glass shifts unexpectedly, unpredictably, and bites back. Sometimes the glass realizes the power it had all along to save itself. Eventually the glass recognizes that it is the brokenness that has strengthened it by giving it an edge to arm itself. The glass may forever have cracks from breaking, but, once the sun shines in, it is the fractured places that create beautiful rainbows of color radiating outward into the world.
