the length of waves

Today is the three year anniversary of my singledom. On this day, three years ago, I stood in an apartment that felt like home and asked the boy who called me the love of his life a few days prior, if he had slept with someone else. The room was still and the conversation brief. “Did you sleep with her?” My words perfectly spaced and annunciated. “Yes.” “Were-you-going-to-tell-me?” Felt like counting syllables on fingers. “No.”
I went to my drawer and cleared my things. He brushed his teeth and it didn’t matter because I didn’t want to be stopped. He had made a choice, a movement, an action. One that spoke so loudly it drowned out even the white noise of I love yous and of anything else he could say. You see, in relationships, the beauty and the most terrifying are the same . That two people make a choice to be together. To converse. To affect. To love. Through a union bound by things we can’t see, we experience life in the same moments, same touches, same space…but completely differently. We’ll never know what exactly joy feels like to another, how the race of a heartbeat feels from the inside, the ache of longing and the heart string it’s tied to. There are two in the alliance and when one strays, it goes. The thought is romantic and destructive and soaked in vulnerability.

There is irony on this day. You see, it’s Mother’s Day. As I proudly exclaimed to my mother at lunch today that we were celebrating something else – my singleness – she didn’t get it. She offered a halfhearted congratulatory statement and I know that it’s because she equates love with happiness. But I have that. I was staring love in the face. For some, being “alone” is challenging, depressing, scary. For me, it’s been crucial, enlightening, and valued. There are many a lesson that I’ve learned over the past 1095 days, but in celebration of this time, I decided to just focus on one for each year.

The Selfish Secret

For most of my life I strived to be selfless; I put everyone’s needs before mine and found joy in it. The word “no” never tasted air and was lodged down somewhere in the back of my throat, while compliance resided on my lips. After a chain of serial monogamy I decided to dabble in the realm of so called “selfishness” or, as I like to call it, doing what I actually wanted to do. I walked the line of compulsion and lost my balance to recklessness a time or two. It was a process I had to figure out, a balance somewhere in-between standing in the corner talking to no one and waking up in the room of a boy who had a black light Sublime poster (this is real). To be honest, I made a lot of mistakes and hurt a lot of people. It was a foreign concept to me, and my heart still aches when I think about the first time someone brought it to my attention. But, it was necessary. And I’m better because of it. The “selfishness” wasn’t solely contained to the topic of boys; I applied it to all my relationships. Every time my presence was requested I would pause. I lived by the motto “if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.“ I would question myself before each answer. I learned that things are better when your heart is in it, and if your heart is only half way there? It shouldn’t be there at all. I became more alive, more alert, a better person. I loved myself more. I learned that you can’t fill someone else’s cup if yours is empty and that the people that really matter will understand. I realized the power of solitude, of stillness. It took all the way up to a month ago, sitting alone, in quiet, on a beach across the world from my every day life, for me to realize I’d like a companion. But not just anyone, one that has mastered his own “selfishness”, one that could sit in inaction and still feel moved.

Tata to Tabula Rosa

Single for three years? Whoa.
Listen. It’s not that I’ve been completely alone in the romance department this whole time. I have asked the same questions to different people on way too many dates to count. The world of internet dating makes strangers accessible at my finger tips; I just so happen to have used those same fingers to wave goodbye to all of them. And it’s not even that any of them were terrible (spoiler alert: some were), it’s just that they weren’t for me. We all start as blank slates, yes. But in my nearly three decades of life I have discovered happiness, experienced heartbreak, developed automated responses that have somehow slipped out of my control. My moral compass has found it’s direction and my roots of self-identity are chilling hard and not going anywhere. I will continue to grow and learn on a daily basis, but when it comes to my core values and beliefs, they aren’t going anywhere… so is the same of our potential partners. For the most part, we know what we want and how that feels. As I know time is irreplaceable, I try not to waste any of it, others or mine. A real connection, one that warms and feeds your soul, is hard to come by. In my truthful speaking to this internet abyss, I can tell you, that for a moment, I had forgotten what it felt like. That I started to wonder if it was even still possible. That in the past three years I have only felt it twice. Once with a boy I shared a made for movies kiss with in the middle of union station and once while sitting on the trunk of a boy’s car eating cherries. Both of those individuals I have shared less than a days worth of hours with, yet they have changed my life eternally.

Romance isn’t dead

Nor is it just for lovers. It’s an action of love, of excitement. Both are things I seek to have on a daily basis. Working in a hotel has served as a catalyst for my becoming a purveyor of romance. Everyday I am reminded that romanticism and attention to detail still exist; that every individual has the power to make something extraordinary, memorable. That single actions create resonations and that love, in some breakdown and some cliché, is actually probably all we need. I fall in love every day; with strangers, with conversations, with ideas. We’re all just vestibules of ardency and can use it however we please. I have loved more in the past three years than I ever did in relationships. I have turned love in to a verb with my friends, my family, myself. I have deconstructed dependencies, abandoned resiliency, and found depth in shallows. I have lived life in love, without having a “love of my life.” And it has been good.

A half of my life’s time ago, my mom told me I would never know what it was like to be lonely. I really didn’t understand it at the time, but in the same way she told me a dirty joke when I was six so she could be the first, eventually all the things make sense. The past three years of being “alone” have been so full, so inspiring, so centering. A morning of breakups and breakdowns in an apartment that felt like home forced me to create a home in myself and I couldn’t be more thankful.

So here it goes and here I am and here is to the quest for love, though it’s certainly everywhere.