"Before you leave this bathroom, you have to believe this: you are beautiful. And him? No tiene ni un brillo" (he is worth nothing, he has no brightness in your life).
It was my last night in Chile. My last night in South America. My last night of the life I had been creating with him. I was feeling all sorts of emotions, and the relationship front we'd kept up for the past two months had finally come tumbling down when Yesse, my beautiful new Chilean friend and confidant, asked me what was heavy on my heart. Her womanly intuition had picked up on the weight.
The details aren't important anymore. Simply put, I saw yellow flags where I should've seen red. The fact of the matter is that it ended. It was terrible--oh my God, was it terrible. The deepest sadness I'd ever experienced had settled inside me before we'd even left for the trip, but I pressed on thinking that we could work with what was left. It wasn't enough. The worst part of the entire ordeal, though, was that I had become convinced that I wasn't enough. I was not enough for him because I was not enough for myself. And that's what Yesse was working to correct on that last night while touching up her mascara in the bathroom of the Spaniard's apartment whose birthday we were celebrating up on the rooftop in Santiago.
Landing on North American soil, driving immediately to Alabama to take a job, starting a new life without the man with whom I'd lived every second of the past year and a half, with whom I'd planned a marriage, babies, life; doing none of the things that my life had been leading up to since I'd met him? Probably (definitely) the scariest point in my life. He was first my best friend and partner, had been for years, but second, my future. Without realizing it and as embarrassing as it is for me to admit, I had become dangerously dependent on him for security, happiness, and confidence. The last time I saw him was when we parted at the airport. It felt like my heart had stopped and the wind was knocked out of me. When he drove away, I had a panic attack as my sister held me tight and let me deflate.
A scary, deep depression is what I would've faced had my friends and family, the most beautiful people on planet earth and beyond, not come swooping in to the rescue. I am emotionally surrounded by the most wonderful range of bests, each with their own level of involvement and advice, but all with the same steady out pour of support. Each one of them represents a breath of fresh air, and I'm resuscitated during each visit with which I'm gifted.
What a heartbreaking yet simultaneously beautiful and necessary journey I've been on this year. I am better for it! I expected this trip to have answers, but it also had lessons. So many chapters have ended that it's time to start a new book. But before I begin writing anew, I have to tell you my stories from the one I've just finished. Had my iPad not been stolen early on in the journey, you would've long since read them, but unfortunately life had other plans. I decided that, rather than trying to type them all out on my phone to you, I'd just wait and digest them myself first, let them come when the time was right. I don't know if now is that time, but I do know that what I'm sure is my early onset Alzheimer's will soon be pushing details out of my head, and I have to write them before they slip away like waves upon the sand.
The truth is that I am constantly narrating my life in my head as the memories are being made. Things that I've seen and done through which I wish I could've held your hand. Things I know would've made you smile or cry too. So many people have supported and loved me through my adventures that I feel as if they're there strolling beside, living them with me. The most flattering thing in the world to me is when you ask me questions. Some of you asked me to blog, and just the thought of your taking the time to read my little rinky-dink writings riddled with ADHD and insanity and beauty and terror and lots of boredom in betwixt has to be just about the biggest compliment I could ever receive. I write for myself to look back and remember my happiest times, and so one day my nieces and nephews (God-willing) can read about the madness that was my young life and realize that they don't need to have their shit perfectly together to be "completely and perfectly and incandescently happy," as Jane Austen so eloquently put it. But also because you asked. Because you care enough to take time to read my stories, and because of that I will always make time to write them.
