We all know that breakups are difficult. Especially in the beginning but even in the later days, post break-up. I thought that the most difficulty would come when I attempted to date. I was wrong. Well sort of.
The difficulty comes from the little things. The everyday things…like when driving down the street and spotting a tree swing in some rich person’s wide expanse of a lawn, I am reminded of a night when I was happy in the company of a man I was intimate with.
A night when we walked back to his house from the local redneck bar, weaving drunkenly, laughing uproariously as we entertained our imaginations with stories about ridiculous things. We philosophized about houses with faces, eyes and mustaches, titling the grouping of these fanciful houses, “mustache row” and “mustache alley,” while laughing so hard that our back and forth weaving grew more intense. With the onset of the giggles, the stories shifted to that of my current and very horrifying situation(getting my picture printed in ‘the slammer’), and we romanticized a situation where we just weaved and stumbled our way into the bushes only to have my face recognized later by some avid reader of the slammer. These memories actually make me smile now that I write but the initial memory that brought this trip down memory lane to the forefront was that damned swing. For some reason I was immediately overwhelmed by the memory of stumbling into somebody’s yard(still laughing) and jumping onto their picturesque swing, the branches creaking under my drunken and probably quite leaden weight as he moved in behind me to push. The swinging didn’t last long for fear of being caught but something about this memory just…sends a wave of sadness through me. It happens like this from time to time and there seems to be nothing I can do to stop it. I try to banish it from my mind, using visualization techniques where I put him on a train to somewhere far away but of course, that stupid train still manages to chug on back into town. I know that eventually these things will become less painful, dating will feel more normal and that when a new man puts his arms around me, I won’t find myself feeling the ghost of a body that seems to be missing. I will get comfortable with the weight of this new man as he cuddles me in my sleep and maybe I will even be able to learn how to love somebody new.
I am just learning it may be a little too soon because I have already had to untwine those new and unfamiliar arms from around my waist, murmuring that, “I am just not sure, not ready…” and then the unspoken thought, “bear with me?” Sigh. I can only hope that these once happy and now sad memories will begin to feel more neutral, like just another piece of my emotional history. Then (hopefully), I may finally be able to create new, happier memories that have no need for fading…have no need for boarding that ridiculous runaway train.
