After so much noise, after all this time, love finally doesn’t feel like it’s shouting. This love is quiet. And when I look into those big brown eyes I can hear them whisper, “you are safe”.

I am so often consumed with this repeating phrase in my head. The words. “Remember this… remember this…”, haunt me as I try and sleep, and even in my dreams.

But as I drive home to the people I love most, there is only one thing I’m hearing over and over tonight.

“You lost”.

I love that you always leave something behind. Like a hurricane, you leave traces of your presence everywhere you go.

You’re absolutely wild, making moves at such a high speed that sometimes all that’s left of your path is disaster.

You’re intense, always giving me a safe space to be just as angry, and have feelings just as big.

But

When your surroundings turned to rubble around you, you chose to stay. I watched as new life started to grow. And when the storm raged up inside and tore that growth from the roots up, you started again.

Your resiliency, your ability to still be kind in a harsh world, your strength when you could have been weak, inspires me.

A torrent of circumstances within and beyond your control, with a center of calm so palpable it has put my mind and heart to rest over and over.

It’s a joy to know you, to love you.

You are real, you are good.

Through the storm, during the rebuild, and into the slow and steady rebirth, I will be here patiently, gratefully.

Reminding you,

You are worth it.

I always said I couldn’t love someone new.

The idea of meeting someone I know nothing about, who knows nothing about me, seems like asking for disappointment and heartbreak. How could I trust that someone was actually who they portrayed themselves to be at this point? I’ve held strong to those who have walked with me through the mess that my life has been for the last 4 years, and that’s it.

No new friends.

But I already knew him. He had already been in my life. I had seen him at some low moments and he had watched me crumble at mine. He sat in the backseat one night over a year ago, in front of my ex’s parents house, as I revealed my deepest shame to him. I knew he was the one person who would understand what it was like to create your own misery, even when you desperately wanted something different. He was my friend. I trusted him. But everytime we would become closer as friends, the chaos in our own lives would distance us. I kept reaching out to him, desperate to have him see himself the way I saw him, all the while rejecting the voice in my ear that told me I was making a fool of myself. My ex would ridicule me, laughing at how stupid I was to think of him as “family”, that he didn’t care about me and never did. I sat with him the night I went to the hospital and tried to tell him how much his presence in my life meant to me. He watched me as I was tormented that week of the Miami fair. He told me it was the first time he realized that I was actually a good person and not the POS I was made out to be. He listened to me as I cried that week. He defended me, he believed me.

I remember sitting in the car as I applied makeup to his skin so his job wouldn’t see the black eye he had gotten the day before and thinking, “this person is so precious to me”.

We did face masks together, had dinners with my family, spent countless nights out or just riding around, separated but still together. Something about him, his hurt, his heart, I was never been able to move on from.

I’ve said before that I struggle knowing when it’s time to let go. And in true form, I have never been able to shake the memories he left in my head. I’ve never been able to convince myself that he was not that empathetic, non judgemental, smart as fuck person I spent so much time with. I couldn’t convince myself the things he said, he didn’t mean.

I can see all of it so clearly still. Watching him sleep in the backseat all those late nights, listening to him explain why I couldn’t get past the third day, carrying loads of laundry to the laundromat when my son was suffering, leaving work to pick him up on the side of the road, giving him the notebook and Christmas cactus before he went to the hospital, sitting in my car as I sat parked in the lot right before his house, gripping the steering wheel so hard it hurt my palms and screaming in anger and grief, knowing what was about to happen to him all over again. I remember sitting in the pews the day of the funeral, tears flowing down my face, staring at the back of his head, thinking, “please don’t take him too”.

I kept trying. There was no evidence that anything I said mattered to him. I would send him paragraphs, telling him that I was there for him. That he didn’t have to struggle alone, that the world needed someone like him, someone who was kind, and intelligent, and good – that I didn’t want to him to die. And even though I wouldn’t hear anything back, I still couldn’t let go.

Then, at the beginning of the year, I saw him, standing outside of the gas station alone. My daughter was in the passenger seat. She had watched me worry and care for him so much the last year.

“You gotta get out and talk to him”. 

I threw open the door and ran and wrapped my arms around him. I looked up into the face of someone who was hurting so badly, his eyes rimmed with purple and his skin turned a shade of greenish-grey. I told him I was sober. I told him that I loved him and that I was here for him. That I would continue to be there for him. When I got back into the car, my daughter and I both sobbed. 

“That might be the last time we ever see him alive.”

He texted me three days later. He told me he was almost 30 hours in. I raced to him and dropped off everything I could think of that he would need. 

And from there? He’s allowed me to support him like I’ve always wanted to, and in turn he has supported me. He’s listened to me, become closer to my family, been kissed by my mother, cooked with me, walked with me, met my best friend, held me, healed parts of me that I couldn’t heal on my own. He showed me the beach. He has assured me everytime I have been scared and spiraling, he’s proven he is capable of handling my insecurities; without making me feel so broken, and become someone I can’t see my life without. He has earned my trust.

I loved him before, but it’s different now. He wasn’t someone new, but I guess I kind of am.  

I was five months sober yesterday. And while I’m scared of what these feelings in me will cause my future ones to be, I’m also excited. I’m happy. 

He makes me feel safe. Every day I spend with him, only makes me love him more.

I don’t think I could have loved someone new. But maybe not because I was too afraid. Maybe not because it seemed like it would be a waste of time.

Maybe I felt that way because that part of my heart was already reserved for someone who’s face I could never forget. 

“I was all in from the start.” 

I am not good at permenancy. 

Going through my life, most of the things that I have called mine haven’t stayed around very long. 

I have lived in, and lost so many homes. I’ve wrecked or ruined every car I’ve ever owned. I’ve had countless jobs and struggled keeping any of them. I’ve been married and divorced, and almost every single friend I’ve ever had, I am no longer friends with. My counselor told me one time that the issue with my memory, and the way I seem to forget feelings and people and the reality of a situation not very far behind me has to do with the permanence part of my brain. I struggle recalling the way I felt the day before, not in the sense that I don’t remember what happened, more so that my brain has forgotten what the emotion truly felt like. 

It surfaces in physical ways and ways that only I can only try to explain how it feels. 

For example, at work, if a student gets called down to the office, I will respond on the phone with “Sure, they’ll be right down”. Meanwhile my students look at me (not as much anymore since we’ve been together a while) with confusion only to say, “Uhh, they’re not even here today”. Or if someone were to paint a building a different color that I pass by everyday, I would have no capability of remembering what color it was before or even notice it’s different than it was. Everytime I go to the store I have to make a list, even if it’s for only one thing. I also have to write down exactly what I need in the exact moment I think of it, or five minutes later I will completely forget I needed anything or that I even was going to go to the store. The second my environment changes, I forget what was in the previous one. When I walk out of the store, every. single. time without fail, I have absolutely no idea where I parked my car. Not just like semi aware but not sure how far down, I will see the parking lot and it’s like my mind goes completely blank and I have to hunt around for AWHILE to find it.  I run out of gas on a monthly basis because I see my gas light on and by the time I have reached the gas station I forget I need it. And again and again until my car stops moving. 

A more serious example that isn’t as visible is the way I can’t hold on to how people feel or remember how I feel around them. When my ex boyfriend used to go on trips, I remember asking him every single day, sometimes multiple times a day if he still loved me, and telling him it didn’t even feel like we were dating anymore. If I can’t see someone’s face, if someone hasn’t told me they care about me or I matter to them that day, I struggle recalling that security I felt when they told me the day before. I can’t remember what isn’t directly in front of me. 

It makes keeping relationships difficult. 

This is all especially frustrating because I do NOT like change. The few things I do remember I do not like to be altered. When I move into a new house, I arrange it as close to the old one as possible and never touch it again. I put up the same posters, the same decorations, and soak into the comfort of things being exactly the same. 

I slept with sheets two sizes too small for my bed for the last year, safety pinning them to the end of the bed because I couldn’t bear to change the way my bed looked when I was in it. 

But there has been one constant in my life. That’s my best friend. I’ve known him since I was 14 and we worked together in an ice cream shop. There was an immediate kinship between us, although we outwardly appear very different. We listened to the same music, had the same sense of humor, and friendship with him was easy. He defended me when I needed it, and he never judged me. I lost contact with him when I got pregnant with my son and got married, but only a few short months after separating with my ex husband we found each other again. Since then he has walked with me through every episode, every victory, every dramatic change I have undergone for the last 4 years. He really isn’t even a friend to me anymore, he’s my family. He is the one constant in my life that doesn’t statistically have to stay, but he chooses to anyway. The one constant I know I can count on. 

The last blog post I posted before I took a long break from writing, too tired to even function let alone express myself, I wrote about him. I said that he had made me realize something that had opened my eyes to my own self sabotage and I wanted to share more about it. I never did, instead falling into a very painful 6 months of chronic drug abuse and emotional torment. 

I remember the night so clearly. We were sitting on my bed, his back facing the headboard and wall, me cross legged facing him and I was crying. I was once again fighting to keep myself together after the devastation that the person I was with had caused me to feel. I was angry and confused and my heart was broken. 

My best friend and I have always had the kind of relationship that isn’t afraid to call each other out when needed. It hasn’t always been pretty, but it’s some of the most authentic love I’ve ever experienced. He used to get frustrated with me when I would call him out, saying that I held him to standards that I didn’t even hold my partner to. And he was right. I did hold him to a higher standard, and I wasn’t afraid to tell him so. He has always made me feel safe enough to tell him anything, knowing he wouldn’t degrade me, knowing he wouldn’t use the information to manipulate me, knowing he would still be there after I said what I had to say. So yeah, he got the harsher, more authentic side of me sometimes.

That night we faced each other, in a silent home, the only ones still awake, and he showed me that same trust and respect. 

He was angry. He was tired of watching someone he loved hurt themselves over and over again by choosing to stay with someone who was undeserving of the care I was giving. He was tired of cleaning up the mess that I would become, for someone else. He was tired of watching me fall apart, and having to sweep me up, like a fragile vase shattered to pieces, tired of painstakingly putting me back together, all for me to run back into the arms of the person who broke me to begin with. 

He told me he had read my blog. He said while he was glad I was writing, he became more and more frustrated as he read through it. “You’re saying the exact same thing every single time. You’re coming to the same conclusions, talking about the same treatment, the same pain, just sandwiched between moments of relief. Are you forgetting what you wrote? How could you forget how this time is exactly the same as the other times? How could you not remember”? 

I felt stunned. I promised him I would read through my own words that from start to finish, which up until that point I hadn’t done yet. 

That night as I read, I continued to become more and more frustrated. Frustrated that I could be so ignorant of my own feelings. Frustrated that I could be so blind to the grief that had consumed me countless times before, hoping for a different outcome. I was grieving for all that I had endured, and angry at myself for letting it happen over, and over again. 

But like I had done so many times before, I didn’t follow through. I stopped reading my blog after that, and stopped writing completely. 

That summer/fall was one of the worst times of my entire life. I was deeper into my addiction than I had ever been, expanding into areas that I hadn’t before that were causing me to have more severe physical side effects, some that have stayed with me into sobriety. I was desperate for relief, lost and searching for something to make the pain stop. I checked myself into a facility to detox and yet still within two weeks fell back in with both the dealer and the addiction. I spent those months on a whirlwind of some of the most manipulative, cruel treatment I have ever experienced and the whole time allowing it because I couldn’t handle losing the drugs, or him. I was trying to survive, but I was rapidly deteriorating.

Fast forward almost five months or being sober later. I am messaging my daughter this morning and I sent her a text that said this “I don’t want a relationship to ever get to the point where I hate them again. If I see the signs that they aren’t aligning with me I want to walk away.” and one that followed that said “only I can protect myself”.

Last winter, I started reading through my blog on a regular basis like I had promised to do. At least once a month I will read it from start to finish. It usually leaves me feeling awful, with vivid flashbacks and nightmares. But I know that for my own sake, it’s necessary to remember the words I’ve written and the ways I have felt. 

When I sent that text to her, something in my head triggered my memory, and I knew I had said those words before. 

I wrote this in April 2024 under the blog titled “But what’s worse? The pain or the hangover?”.

“I hope I remember this. I have always said that I have been waiting my whole life for

someone to protect me.

How strange, at 31, to realize that maybe that someone,

has been me all along.

Maybe the way I break this cycle of ending up with people who aren’t meant for me, who are unsafe for me, is that I stop looking for safety in them.

If I can learn to keep myself safe, then maybe I will learn to see things as they are, not what I want them to be. If I can learn

what makes me feel unsafe early enough, anyone who threatens that, will not have

access to me.

Maybe if I find safety and comfort within myself, I will finally be free.”

My memory is shit. But I remembered that. I remembered that I wanted better for myself. I remembered that I am my own keeper. That I am my own protector. That I have the ability to stop things before I am so entrenched that I can’t get out. 

It was a weird moment. But I’m thankful for it. I’m doing what I said I would do. I am remembering the promises I made to myself. Because of my best friend, because of me. 

I am healing.

I talk a lot about hope in this blog.

Here’s what I’ve been hoping lately.

I hope you get scammed on Facebook marketplace.

I hope you never own a car that’s not a piece of shit.

I hope the next time you go to give a cop the card inside your glove box, my hair bands fall out and he searches your car.

I hope you never leave “up” from the casino, and if you do you lose all of it that day.

I hope you’re never able to hear a Kanye West song without thinking of me.

I hope no one ever notices the little things about you.

I hope you get banned from your favorite bars.

I hope all of your whales start to grind this summer one by one until you can only have one rider at a time.

I hope you always have a white streak under your nose after going to the bathroom and never realize it.

I hope every stupid pick up line you try and give a woman falls flat every time.

I hope you get drug tested for your ID the next time you travel to the fair.

I hope your posture continues to get worse.

I hope people make fun of you for the bald spot on the back of your head behind your back.

I hope you never forgive yourself for pretending to be someone else in high school.

I hope you never have real friends, only “associates”.

I hope you break your ankle again.

I hope your nose never clears up.

I hope I never see you again a day in my life.

I hope everyone you think is loyal to you shows their true colors at the worst possible moment.

I hope you keep having your mom do your adulting for you and you never learn to grow up.

I hope your lose your headphones everytime you buy a new pair.

I hope you can never smell your own bad breath.

I hope it always pours when your windshield wipers need to be changed.

I hope you are ignored everytime you seek attention from a stranger.

I hope everything is never better than “alright”.

I hope you can’t watch basketball ever again.

I hope your brother gets the fuck away from you and your family.

I hope you never get the balls to cover up that tattoo.

I hope you always have the fashion sense of an NPC.

I hope you become a spitting image, inside and out, of your father.

I hope the stress that you used as a reason to degrade and disrespect me, gets worse every morning you wake up, and you never find true peace.

I hope the only friend you have, sees you for the low life you are and leaves you behind to live a better life.

I hope the people you use for your own gain never die because of your inability to care that your “job” kills people.

I hope the memories of you screaming at a woman who loved you haunt you until the day you die.

I hope you can still feel that spit on your face.

I hope I heal from every wound you left and the scars fade to nothing.

I hope you get what you deserve.

There’s a place between anger and love.

There’s a place between giving up and hope.

There’s a place between hurt and peace.

There’s a place between sadness and pride.

I’m in that in between now. There will always be a place for you in my heart, even if there isn’t one in my days.

There’s no anger. There’s no bitterness. There’s no spite.

There is still joy, even in the loss.

I don’t think I’ve ever loved and lost and wished them well and meant it.

But I wish you that. I wish you well. I always have, and I always will.

This post is not about you.

I’ve spent so much time on this beach recently. I’m sitting here now, on a piece of decking laid atop two perfectly placed roots of a tree. A seat made for two. Remnants of fires I’ve had with people I love scatter the sand to my right and the rain is starting to come down harder, soaking through my shoes and covering my skin. 

I had been here so many times with you before. I always wondered why you called this spot tucked away a “beach”. A small parking area with only trees in front of it, we would come here when you had a deal to make and that’s all I knew of it. Always the passenger, I couldn’t have even gotten here on my own if I tried because the only times I had been here was in the middle of the night when I was already high. 

This place holds such different memories for me now. Roasting hotdogs and marshmallows with people I never thought would see me as good, looking for shells with the kids, the photo I have on my wall, making a bucket list with one of my best friends, sobbing in his arms on the sand when my head felt like it was spinning out of control, petting horseshoe crabs with my daughter. 

I never knew this was here.

I never knew that behind the wall of trees, there was a path that lead to the water. That there was sand, and shells, and a place to rest. 

This place has been here the whole time. The beach is the place I love the most. And it was here the whole time. 

You never told me. You never showed me what was right in front of me all of these years. A place that could settle my mind, and bring peace to my heart, was hidden when I was with you. 

In some ways I’m glad I never shared this place with you. I don’t think I could come here now if I did. 

That’s how it always was. I was always so close to what I wanted. I was always so close to a happy moment, to safety, but I couldn’t access it. 

That feeling of serenity was blocked, not by trees, but by you. 

This place has become somewhere that I’ve spoken out my deepest fears, a place I have laughed at, a place I have held hands at, a place I have dreamed of the future and made plans to live. 

All the things I tried to do with you. 

The no trespassing sign nailed to the divider at the end is the only thing you have in common with this place. 

I woke up feeling your arms around me this morning. I opened up my phone and unblocked your number, a fleeting thought that if I did, maybe I would have the chance of seeing that you still miss me. That you were trying to reach me. But before I even left the screen, I changed my mind. I blocked it again, finally knowing better, and I came here. 

A place that gives me all that you couldn’t. 

I miss you. But I have been missing you, the person I wanted so badly, since June of 2023. I think part of me always will. 

But I am making new memories. And I’m going to be fine. You always said you would be if I was gone. That life would carry on. 

You were right. 

“I’ve been thinking of so many hurts from so many years today for some reason. So many memories ripped away from me too soon or so many that were stained into me without my consent. I stood out there in that rain and just had this moment where it literally felt like it was washing away the blood from my skin. Like the world was weeping for me. Then I started crying and it was like the world was weeping with me. I know it will still be hard sometimes. The rain didn’t heal the wounds, but tonight felt like the world was grieving with me and helping me release what doesn’t serve me anymore and it was beautiful.”

Losing you was the end of everything I wanted.

How beautiful it is, 115 days later, to want so many things I never knew were there all along.