September 19, 2001: one bucketful at a time
Driving home, I had a lot of time to think.
I was thinking of Ragged Robin, and why I was so very attached to her for almost three years after we broke up, back in 1998.
Part of it was the way we parted--very gently, with no anger on either side. While these days I can still love someone and be angry at them, anger helps to make the break permanent. Closure, of a sort.
And part of it was that she changed me. She came into my life, eased my hurts, and helped me back onto my feet at a time when I was sorely hurting and not all that much fun to be around.
She introduced me to limerance so strong that the entire time we were together and for a year afterward, I didn't so much as glance at another person, male or female, sexually. I couldn't imagine that sex with anyone else would even come close to what I had with her. Once I'd tasted the good stuff, I was forever spoiled for what I'd been subsisting on before.
I had never been so much in love that I became naturally monogamous. I'd never been fully convinced that I was worthy of love before she came along, and once she convinced me, I became less tolerant of hurtful behavior on the part of my partners, more choosy of those partners in the first place, and more willing to stand up for myself. I learned a lot from her about why people reacted to me as they did and what people actually saw in me. And for the first time in my life I was with someone who was fully transparent to me, who was such a natural empath that I was unafraid to expose all of myself. She convinced me, by just being who she was, that I was and would always be safe with her. I knew she'd never yell at me, or hit me, or get so angry with me that she couldn't hear what I was saying. I knew that if a mistake was made on either side, we'd listen calmly to the problem and instead of getting defensive about our motives, we'd work to solve the problem. It was just that sort of relationship.
And she changed me, by being who she was, by understanding me and being genuinely fascinated by me as I was fascinated by her. There is a certian amount of bonding that only happens when both people are empaths, who are able to experience what the other person is feeling. I never doubted that she loved me because I could feel how she felt, and it was as tangible as her breath on my skin or my fingers against her cheek.
I didn't unbond to her because it honestly never occurred to me to do so, even after we broke up. It had to happen gradually, over time, and even now I feel the echoes of our bond and I am glad of them. Some things never go away entirely. For so long, she was a near-physical craving in me, and I never want to be free of the memory of that, to remind me that there are people--and potential relationships--out there that are that powerful, and to remind me to never settle for anything less than that.
She left me better than she found me.
There are few enough people in this world that can say that about me.
I don't know what would have happened had we stayed together. Would we have still been happy, three years later? Maybe, maybe not. It's hard to tell.
But thanks to her, I'm a stronger person who has a lot better idea of what her heart truly wants. And that, my friends, is never a bad thing at all.
I'm cranky this afternoon. Network access at work is crawling like pudding, and so I'm not resaponding to emails, partially because network access is just impossible right now, and partially because I'm just too cranky to do so.
Grr hiss.
I was held for a long time last night.
I can honestly say i needed that. Last week was life-changing for me, both in things that are intensely personal and things that are very, very public. I needed to be held for a long time in silence by someone who knows me well enough to know when words are just inadequate, when I can speak most eloquently in the language of the rhytm of my breathing, of muscle tension and relaxation.
I speak volumes without saying anything at all.
[Thank you.]
I am, unfortunately, very good at horror. I am the one who keeps her head in emergencies, using my dissociative tendencies to hold the awfulness at one remove while I work to make everything better or at least keep everyone I can as safe as I can. I just don't think of the consequences of what happened, I don't think of the terror, the horrible facts of everything.
But later, I feel it. I feel it all so clearly.
I am grieving for a worldview, I am grieving for the dead i don't know, I am rejoicing that everyone i know in NYC and Washington are all right. I am grieving for the lost innocence of people who never beleived it could happen here. (I've always, always known it was just a matter of time. I've always been aware that some day, very suddenly, i could become a statistic. That knowledge never leaves me. When I was young, we worried constantly about nuclear attacks. It was only a matter of time. It still is.)
I am grieving for all the people who are suddenly feeling like targets because of where they live or work.
The dead are dead. I mourn for the living--the rescue workers who aren't looking for bodies but fragments of bodies, who are looking for DNA. The survivors, who will always live with the "what if". The people all over the country who lost family and friends.
I mourn for the loss of our freedoms that will surely come on the heels of this disaster. I am afraid that we as a people will lose what little remains of our privacy, that strong cryptography will become illegal.
I fear for Muk, who works in a very high-profile building in Washington. Yet, it's more important than ever that good, sane people like her be involved in the government at all levels.
We are all trying to understand this and failing. But we all try, and keep trying, and keep taking little bits of hope where we can find them. Like the people sifting through the rubble of the physical buildings, we are all sifting through the emotional aftermath of what happened. And like them, we cannot use large machinery to move the physical or emotional debris. We go through our little bits of the attack with fine-toothed combs.
Confronting horror, one bucketful at a time.
