Someone asked me today what I would do if I could do anything. "Write," I said. She didn't tell me to find a way to do it, or to abandon everything else to make it work, or to squeeze it in between crackless commitments that intentionally distract me from despair. I filled in those things. Silently. At the exact time as the words left my mouth and before her non-response counter-intuitively validated how I don't need anyone to validate this.
So here I am. Writing. About who knows what, or for who knows who, and until who knows when. I am 2/3 of a bottle of wine in, on a weeknight, at my apartment, alone, again, as per usual, and it's almost bedtime, and the loneliness is yet again palpable and consuming.
These are sentiments that are not acceptable from a 28-year-old progressive woman. Be strong, be enough, be impermeable, give single feminists a good name. I am crying because I miss him. My soul misses him and his love for my holes. And for what he loved of was left in the spaces where there weren't holes. And, now that there are black holes between us warping time and space, and he is filling another woman's holes which are glaringly similar to my own, I am left with the agony of pouring sand into a riverbed. My holes were created by a man -- although not him -- and they will be filled by one. And in the meantime, I can pour sand into my soul, but I ache for someone to devote their presence to shovel alongside me.
Time heals, I suppose, but it also renders one more undesirable and eroded. Life's toll is not without scarring, and as we progress, we develop more disclusionary criteria for whose weathering most closely mimics our own -- or perhaps compliments in a jigsaw sort of way. It is defeating to saunter alone. It's not even particularly comforting to know that others also walk a solitary path; the only comfort lies in the elusive hope that another isolate soul may sync beside you in your walk, and snug their bucket into your sandpit, and eventually enable your pouring to find a limit. And then the pouring will transform into a pointy, pouring climbing pile, above the surface, and towards the heavens. And it will no longer be a charge into the void, but a collaborative upward push. Maybe all that binds us moment to moment is this fated hope. But I want to be okay with the hole itself. Because a hole by definition is what holds it up, and what and who holds me up is . . . everything.
