Listening for the Possible

“What we think we want from each other when we say "I love you" or any of those other things is, I think, very complex and sometimes very depressing and sometimes kind of weirdly beautiful.”
-Joss Whedon

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
- From Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

I am in love with a man who doesn’t want me.

Strange, isn’t it? I have received all kinds of advice and wow, do I have some opinionated friends. But I am not wracked by pain now. My health goes up and down, but I am a long way from the crisis I was in. With short-lived exceptions, my mind is clearer. I can listen to my heart now, listen to the soft animal inside me.

I don’t know what it means. Mister is talking to me again. There were eight long weeks where he was not. But now, we are talking. We go out for drinks and meals. We talk. We talk like we used to talk. We talk about what happened to us. Sometimes it is hard. Sometimes it is just awkward. Often, it is good.

I want him back. It would be stupid and disingenuous to lie about it. I spent a number of years in nonprofits and in political campaigns putting out fires. Identify the issues, resolve or eliminate them, return the group to its vision. Some strangely pragmatic part of myself wants to apply that here. Our main stresses had to do with my health and all the issues that grew out of that. His reactions. My reactions. My pain is 75% better. My mental health? Up by at least 66% percent. I am doing all my maintenance stuff, joining a gym this month. I/we have identified several key areas where our communication and coping skills went offline. Mister and I are moving through the process of forgiving each other. My background as a social justice activist and my affinity with a goddess of chaos lends a certain comfort to things falling completely apart and the need to begin again. Mister seems to think it is not that simple.

He will not discuss getting back together. He is adamant it is off the table. He is guardedly willing to be friends. I cannot guarantee anything either. All I am asking is that we stay open to whatever might happen next. To Possibility. We don’t know. We can’t know. Some days I am better at living in the land of I Don’t Know than others. I am openly looking for ways to love him even if he cannot return the feeling. We will find a way. To go forward. Into something.

For my own sanity, here is where I am. I will not hide how much I love him, which is Beyond All Reason, as Donald would say. Yes, he hurt me. A lot. The more he tried to fix it, the worse it got. It just doesn’t matter. Not in the way that I didn’t deserve more or better but in the sense that he was doing the best he could and I lived anyway. In the sense that I behaved very badly, perhaps unconscionably so, and don’t even have the decency to remember it all, but he lived too. In the sense that this was an incredibly bad year that pushed and punished people in ways that we may not uncover for some time. Let’s go on.

Except we don’t trust each other. There is that. My inner, secret, animal self wants to curl up beside him and just breathe together. It doesn’t trust him either. But it trusts that we could learn to trust him again, that we could rebuild that trust. I don’t think that has ever happened. My trust is slow to come and on a hair trigger. Once you break my trust, second chances are rare, if they ever happen. That this door is even open now is a wonder to me, like a sunrise. Over a year ago, I told Eris to show me something new. The new, it just keeps coming.