It comes again, and lingers again, this morning, as every morning since I have left the men who I’ve loved, as it comes every morning when I wake to find myself yet alone.
The bed is too narrow, I tell myself. It’s the wrong bed, and the mattress is too old, and that’s why I sleep so poorly, why I wake in a fight with my psyche - wanting so much to be happy, embracing the beauty of the day and its potential while facing the reality, day after day, of my astounding aloneness.
“Honestly, I can’t for the life of me understand why you haven’t been snapped up by some eligible bachelor,” my first sailing instructor tells me in some fashion or other every time we chat since I left Ontario three years ago.
Honestly, I can’t, for the life of me, understand why I haven’t also. Except, I do understand.
I accept and expect a certain degree of aloneness in my life. It is only when I am alone – even amidst other people, even with those I love most – when I can fully appreciate the things I love: the way the wafting breezes lift and play with the summer trees’ leaves, turning thin, green appendages into shimmering waves of laughing silver-green, playing midstream between earth and sky; the way certain chefs’ dishes, presented in artistic perfection, interplay in textures, flavors and scents on my palate, arousing endorphins that heighten my culinary sensitivities as strongly as any sensual, sexual interplay has ever done – and with none of the expectation, or disappointment.
I begin to see a pattern in myself: that there is not an ounce of expectation in those things I love all by myself, when I am alone. I was not taught to expect, to demand that the sun shine or that leaves shimmer in the breezes – and yet, they happen so naturally, so easily, all the time. I was not taught to expect bursts of flavor on my palate, food plated in perfect artistic fashion, sudden endorphin highs from food. Food was nutrition, practical, and only occasionally fun.
But men, and love… and some degree of pain in regards to them….
Those, I was taught to expect. To endure.
Why?!? I cannot help but wonder.
Why should I not meander through life, giving love and learning to expect, in so many places and so many times, beauty and love returned, shimmering with the same kind of random repetition as can be found when the trees are full of their tender, fragile fans; as can be found in restaurants the world over.
That I am alone is not a problem. That I wake every morning, remembering the glory of being with one whom I’ve loved, with whom I can share need not be pain, but a gentle reminder that it happened once, twice, several times; and it will happen again.
I am in the springtime of love, even if I am alone – or in the late winter, perhaps – but, somewhere on Earth it is summer, and the breezes lift and play with leaves in that way I love so much. Somewhere on Earth, even if it is night here, chefs are making gorgeous plates with deliciously-woven layers of flavors to lilt on diners’ palates.
Somewhere – in many places, in fact – there is love.
I’m just in the wrong place, or in the wrong time… and it will come again, or I will find it again, when my eyes open, when they’re not so clouded with tears. When I accept where I am, and where I’ve been; when I accept it will happen again.
