Fourteen 02.26.10

As I drove to work this morning, the clouds spread out in chromatic shades of gray over San Mateo. They looked like the lining of the inside of my throat, ripples of tissue that could bring forth sound, and breath. The wind is HOWLING today as if to say what I wish so desperately to say to you, "I miss you."

For the last 3 days, trios of crows have appeared and flown along side my car at the road's edge as I drive. The night before last I was sitting at a stop light waiting to turn. Three of them appeared, two gliding with each other overhead seeming to dance on the wind, the third stayed perched on the street light in front of me, staring at my car. Last night, as I left work, first one then 2 more ink black crows preformed an aerial ballet directly in front of my car as they crossed my path. They have been flying on a soundless wind, against brilliant sunsets like yesterday's sunset as I walked out the door from work. Or rustling in the trees overhead like last night while the moon was haloed in a cloud ring reflecting its luminescence. They have been gliding effortlessly with smooth dagger like feathers of onyx and beady eyes that seem to stare right through me.

This morning was no different, I stood in front of my car waiting to get into the drivers seat and I heard a strange click burring overhead. I looked up and above me on a tree was a single crow. In another tree to the right of it was a pair, their feathers puffed up around them as they withstood the first visages of today's exuberant wind. I stood and stared transfixed, it called twice more into the air at a nameless foe and then, in perfect silent synchronicity they lifted and took flight. They left the branches they vacated trembling in the rising wind. On my way into work, crows swirled around the waving trees along 280. Although they were no longer with me and the spell appeared broken, I knew why they had come. A single crow would give me pause to worry as they signify loss to my pagan ancestors. But a trio…a trio is a symbol, a sign of a good omen that is coming, as if the crows are winging it to me themselves.

By the time I drove past your exit, I saw the clouds overhead and knew the wind would be speaking to you in the words I can not utter. Now the wind is all but animate. It is slamming doors and whistling through cracks in the walls at my work, rattling the large panes of glass that surround me. This wind, it is EPIC, like the kind I imagine whips mercilessly at coastlines before hurricanes descend. It is swelling and bringing down tree branches, scattering leaves violently, and shaking everything with a piercing chilly sigh. Discarded orphaned cherry blossom petals cover the ground like pink snowflakes or pastel confetti. They will soon turn translucent from the rain that is starting to pour.


Today, today it has been 2 weeks since you left.

I miss you with a longing that fills me to the core with a kind of sensation that feels like a hunger pang flowing from my heart. This rain, this torrential downpour, is a reflection of how I am feeling without you with me. I feel the drops washing away the silt and stains from everything it rushes across. I am suddenly wanting to just stand in it, face upturned and let it soak me to the bone. Let this rain baptize me and carry this pain and longing away so that I can remember what is it feels like to kiss you without feeling the hiccup of tears chasing after the memory. My arms feel hollow and ache to hold you. My fingers feel useless without the ability to trace them across your velveteen skin, your brilliant scars.

Speaking of scars, I went to my first therapy session yesterday. Would you like to know how it went? To get here I had to leave work 2 hours earlier than I usually do. I had to completely break my routine. I had to take a freeway I don’t ordinarily in order to make sure I was getting there on time without getting lost like I usually do. I had to gamble with the possibility of traffic and my lack of direction making me miss this. In spit of my fears, I sailed through the glowing yellow sunshine and skipped through the pockets of traffic easily. When I got off the freeway I was jittery, I wanted to be ON TIME to this appointment as it is now SO important to me, so vital and essential to my growth and healing. I was surprised to find that her office is literally a mile from my house, on the very same street. I have walked past here so many time, what a quirk of fate that this should now be the place where I would embark on a personal, mental, emotional, spiritual journey to change my life forever.

I walked into the lobby with my copy of Harry Potter and Sorcerer’s stone and sat, waiting for her as she had instructed me to. I was 10 minutes early. I waited as the sign on her door “in session” mocked my impatience. The words of your therapist echoed in my ears to be more patient, with myself and everything. I sunk further back into the green velvet sofa in the waiting room beneath a still life painting of Native American shaman’s tools and felt my tension sliding out of me. I buried my nose in the pages of this book you love so well. I was reading the scene where Reubus Hagrid appears to Harry on his eleventh birthday at the hut on the rock and the way he changes Harry’s life forever by telling him everything he never knew and then inviting him on a journey to Hogwart’s. The irony of this scene I was reading and the place I was in at that moment was not lost on me. I smiled as I read the story and forgot my worries for a time.

Then she walked into the waiting area and our eyes met. She is an older woman, with curly almost auburn hair. But I had a feeling about this already when she spoke to me on the phone, she sounded older. Good, I thought, I need someone older to help me grow up. I have been so immature and underdeveloped emotionally, the sage point of view of someone who is older and more experienced than me might help me to really slow down, put less pressure on myself and my future, to help me see that I am still so young and full of promise. She shook my hand in a kind but firm way, and then lead me to her office.

As I walked across the threshold, the sunshine outside greeted me through her slightly veiled window. I made an honest but passing remark “the sunshine is so beautiful today,” and heard her soothing voice express she felt the same behind me as the door clicked shut. Inside was a small, but calming space. It is not at all your therapist’s office with the sprawling floor and wide open space between sofas. This was more like a small oasis of calm for me. Inside was a couch, and to its left, two chairs sat abreast a sitting table. In the far left corner of the room next to the window, was a small desk which was neat and tidy. Flanking it was a large bookcase which bore so many books, the amount dazzled me.

I took my place on the sofa, tucking myself into its leftmost seat, leaning on the armrest for support. It was awkward at first, I had so much I wanted to say, but I didn’t know where to start. I had rehearsed this moment so many times in my head, so I would know just what to say, but now that I was in it my mind was blank. No matter, she saved me right off the bat by telling me that she just had a regular appointment time that opened up on Thursdays which works for me with my work schedule and commute in a way I can only describe as a benevolent act of the gods. She asked me, would I like to take that slot? I was holding back the words until she finished her sentence to be polite, as soon as she was done, I took it right away.

And then, we began.

I found that as soon as I began to speak to her, I felt better. This was catharsis. I told her everything I could. I told her about my grandmother passing just 3 months ago, and she told me was sorry to hear that in a way I genuinely believed was heartfelt. I told her about how just 2 weeks ago, I lost the woman I have been in love with and shared my life with for the last 2 years. She wanted to know, what happened between us that our relationship had ended. Battling through tears with a shaky voice I did not recognize as my own, I told her all you had said to me when we spoke that night 2 weeks ago. Even when I cried as I spoke to her and pressed my hand to my chest to quell its pain, I did not stop talking. I am not interesting in hiding these things away anymore and closing them off, I know that I need to talk about them so that I can begin to grow and become more integrated with myself.

I told her what you had said to me about your relationship with your parents and friends being one that was important I should want to share with you, that you felt like I was capable of being mean and nasty and derisive with my behaviors, that I was not treating you as though you were an equal in the relationship and I was trying to pick fights with you and create conflict. I told her how you said I was constantly talking about my past relationships in a way which made you feel threatened and constantly under the microscope. I told her about how I had become a merciless tyrant in the last few weeks of our relationship almost manufacturing conflict all on my own out of thin air. I told her that you felt like I was trying to isolate you from your friends and keep you from being social. And I told her all that you had said about needing to be in the world and experience it on your own to really come to figure out what it was you wanted for your future. I told her how you were kind, and loving, and honest with me even in those moments, and how you have remained that way in my heart.

But it wasn’t as simple as I make it sound. Woven betwixt the bullet points of all you had said to me, I divulged my family background, my history of toxic and codependent relationships, my crippling social anxiety and the habit of lashing out at those I love most when I feel hurt or threatened. I told her about the insights I had gained in just these few short weeks and all the letters I have written to you. I was afraid she would think the letters were unhealthy, she did not. She thought they were a way for me to chart my progress, and experience my emotions so that I could examine them in a way that brought me insight and helped me to learn more about myself.

She was particularly impressed with my willingness and readiness to work on my issues and was really encouraging. She reassured me it is totally possible for me to embrace and make the changes I want to in regards to my behaviors, understanding my emotions, and being able to have a more meaningful relationship with myself and others. I was SO RELIEVED to hear this. Part of my resistance to therapy all along has been a deeply seated fear that I am so broken these things could not be altered. You helped me to see that could change with each and every session you brought me into. I wanted to get well, I just didn’t know where to start. I wanted to ask your therapist after he told me in session that one day there WERE ways to reintegrate me into my family hierarchy and free myself from the stigma of omega, are you really saying it’s possible for me to change? Its possible that there are things I can do that will help me to change all of this? I don’t have to be this way? I wanted to ask him ever since that point, what should I do, how can I change? But I didn’t dare ask him.

I just never felt comfortable embracing it, because I didn’t want to interfere with YOUR care. He was YOUR therapist, a resource for you, I should have gone and gotten my own then…but I think I had to put the pieces together more before I could really dive into this with the motivation I now have mustered. I became really jealous of you having that routine care in the end. I was so upset I couldn’t heal that way, change that way, grow that way you have in even just the last 2 years I have known you. Let alone all the years of trauma before that I was not there to witness, which you have come out of reborn and on a path that will lead you to certain success and happiness. As you grew and went through your metamorphosis, it became abundantly clear I had been stranded on a self imposed plateau. I was stagnant and static. I was holding myself back, but I didn’t realize it yet. I honestly thought that I was doomed to stay this way forever. I was so glad to hear that she believed we could work to alter this cycle of self abuse and it was really possible.

She was compassionate, but seemed able to interject, can you imagine? Anyone interjecting my train of thought has to have some balls I thought as she would speak up and slow my rapid quaking voice to a halt. She would make her remarks about how I must be feeling or what my perception must have been in regards to something I brought up in an organic and insightful way that surprised me. The things she said to me seemed as if she had been granted access to my thoughts and she understood the things I have been feeling and how it has now allowed me to change my point of view and look at myself. She was really right on with a lot of the things she said to me, and I felt like this was good because I need someone that can really get into these issues with me and think about it from a point of view that is objective, grounding, yet sensitive and pragmatic.

Would you like an example of what I am talking about? I found it particularly amusing when I spoke to her about my lasting issues with crippling social anxiety and how I wanted to change this. I told her I was fed up and frustrated with this as I am a social and gregarious person but I struggle with my anxiety, codependent relationships, and self isolation. She asked me to describe what it was like, what I experienced when I am feeling the anxiety. At first I only explained to her how it makes me very anxious and exhibits itself in physical ways: the way I fidget, how I talk too much, how I talk too fast, how I chew at my fingers, and my heart races. But it was when I told her the things the constant voice that races through my head while I am trying to interact with people is saying to me: "Shut up, you're talking too much, you're going to say something stupid, they aren't going to like you, they're going to see you're a loser, you're embarrassing yourself, be quiet, just stop," that she interjected right away jumping up in her seat. She said "WOW! You have a terrifically strong parental voice censoring you! I mean, I may be wrong, but it sounds like a parent in the way it is talking at you, it has a very strong parental tone that's very critical, no wonder you feel that way!" When she said that I was aghast. She was already helping me to see what was happening to me when I was in these situations and just knowing is half the battle to orchestrating change.

But it wasn’t all tales of the big bad wolf she was sure to stress to me was that I don't have to go in and change EVERYTHING, just gut everything about myself and leave nothing. She told me that this wasn't about making me into a bad person who had no good qualities, but to recognize my strengths as well and build those up too. A wave of serenity washed over me in that moment and some guilty places of me I forgot to forgive felt warmth and healing begin to seep into them. She said that we could work together to start making these changes, but that it will happen slowly. She told me that for them to last we had to really approach them slowly, like the tortoise who wins the race, this is slow and steady but sure to succeed. She told me I may find, like I already have been, just ONE change can be a catalyst for many others. She encouraged me in the steps I have been taking and the way I have been thinking so far and her words filled me with a kind of purpose and strength I have been desiring so badly: "You're definitely ready for therapy, I can see you are really thinking a lot about this and want to change."

We had to stop to sign the paperwork and go over all the finite details. It was then I realized as she sat across from me signing contracts: my therapist is left handed. She did not see my smile that spread across my face then for it was gone when she looked back up at me. But just that thought reminded me of you and the way I watched you write so many times. When I walked out of my session with her I felt like a HUGE weight had lifted off my shoulders and I was finally walking on the right path with my feet facing forward. It was still sunny outside and I was soaking up the sunshine as I felt like a haint was lifted off my skin and I could finally feel its warmth again transforming me into a creature of light and hope. I am looking forward to continuing my therapy regularly once a week from now on and every week in my future. The ability to recognize I can heal and that I finally am doing the work to evolve in that way is something so profound I don't know why I didn't embrace this sooner. I am in such a receptive motivated place it's hard not to imagine that any GOOD therapist wouldn't be able to help me towards a world of change and progress right now, and she feels so right. I cannot wait for next Thursday!

In the meantime love, I hope you are also healing. I hope you are learning more about yourself everyday. And I hope you keep growing and changing. I know in the end, it was that, all the change you have gone through and are going through since I met you that caused me to wall up and lash out. That is not meant to assign blame, but just to let you know, that your ability to change and transform yourself shook me to my core. For someone like me, who didn’t know I could change before, you were terrifying. I saw the change as a betrayal and thought with an icy grip constricting on my heart, it would only be a matter of time before you saw that I was nothing compared to you, and that you would leave me.

I was so afraid you would leave me because in so many ways you had already surpassed me. You were getting on the dean’s list in college, something I was and continue to be SO PROUD of you for. You were able to apply yourself to your schooling in ways I had never seen before in ways I was never able to. You were embracing responsibility, you were engaging with your friends, you were discovering more about yourself everyday. You were growing into the woman I always knew you to be. As you “caught up” to me, I became so ridden with fear. Because at this speed, you would pass me by and I would be dragging you down with me in all my failures to grow up and move into a place of independence and health. And there I sat, stupid and arrogant, thinking all a long there was a problem with you and that you were being immature. The problem I realize now, was fully vested in my point of view. I apologize for projecting my insecurities onto you. You are so wonderfully inspiring; I don’t know why I thought to drive you from me with my nasty behavior.

I can only look forward now and realize that with time, I will leave these bad behaviors behind me. That with grooming self awareness, I can embrace change and empower myself to be all of the good things I hold within me while working on the flaws. This is a journey that will never be fully completed, I realize now, this must go on forever, for I am always a work in progress. The fain has blurred all the windows around me making everything look the way my teary eyes saw them the first few days after you left me. I am about to leave now, I am about to go through another transformation twice more today. When you see me again, and I know you will see me again, I will not look the same. I may not even act the same, and I hope this does not frighten you away from me. I hope you will be able to see me with fresh eyes and see that there are still all the good, wonderful, familiar pieces of my core that you fell in love with once upon a time. I won’t discard my ability to care, or love, or laugh, or be insightful and giving. I am hoping, those qualities show through all the more because of the work I am doing to winnow away the flaws and turn them into things that are more manageable and less toxic.

Until then my sweet bird, my thoughts are always with you, and the wind that these crows are reeling through is howling what I wish most to say to you tonight, “I miss you.”