Falling In Love and Falling Apart or Falling Apart and Falling In Love

The myth of "ready" and feeling it all simultaneously

I am moving between the walls of a Paula Rego exhibition — swimming amongst the mermaids from her Peter Pan series she etched onto paper in the 90s. I have always felt an affiliation to mermaids but right now I feel like Wendy being plunged under water by the jealous sea creatures. Which might be my greatest metaphor to date: drowning by the weight of all I wish I could be, but am not.

I creep around the lake afterwards, trying to shift the permanent ache that has settled between my ribcage. Trying to breathe through every step which tugs the fascia too tightly in my chest. Forcing myself to imagine how lovely the Japanese Garden will look come spring, which feels too far away to hold out hope for now.

It is autumn, not yet Halloween. Something is very wrong, and yet there is an undercurrent of something which is very right.

Stone has been carved into benches and I overlook the lake with my feet up off the ground. I am taking respite from the fatigue, but mostly I am sending text messages. Sharing my day with a boy who feels like my anchor when my ship is otherwise headed off a cliff.

My body’s pain is cleaved from vocabulary, prognosis a far off thing, but I try to lean into honesty. I try without the air of which I consider to be burdensome. To keep contained within my own orbit of healing. So to not let my shit stink. We all have our stuff. And I have always been afraid of appearing too broken to others. Of them leaving because of it.

But as my stuff braids into the boy’s, he is empathetic towards mine. Caring. He seems like my compass needle pointing north when it is otherwise spinning off its face.

Some days before, I am in the hospital, conscious of the phone running hot in my palm. Of it running out of charge and being unable to get home at whatever time of night that may eventually be. I had never felt so unwell, tucked between bloody noses and handcuffed inmates. And yet there was still a part of me that reached to my phone, that risked draining its battery. To text between triage. Reaching to the boy, to something which felt like hope. Like the surety of spring.

I always assumed I would have to snowplough a clear path for good things to enter my life. The sludge windrow pushed to the sides a problem for a later date. Out of sight out of mind. I came of age under the cult of manifestation. Willed myself into futures by rubbing quartz over my body and burning lists under the full moon. I found solace, or distraction, by incessantly moving to the energy of all which I wanted to receive. I believed that to have an untidy side of the street would compromise whatever numinous contract was in place and waiting for me. That you had to be ready for whatever you were looking for.

Sometime in the summer I held up my hands in surrender and admitted to myself I wanted love in my life. Under my own tyranny I did not for one second consider I would find it in a season of harbouring constant panic and pain. That did not seem very ready of me.

Once upon a time I thought this was having faith in order, but it was only the trick of capitalism. If you work hard you will win. If you do the right thing, you will be rewarded. But to think you have any control over how things will unfold is as misguided as believing you are entitled to results simply because you asked nicely for them.

Which is to say, the love of my life was not going to arrive whilst I sat palms up waiting to receive him. He would come as I crawled my way around hospitals and gently attempted to find my mind, as monsters danced behind my eyelids. I would find love in the messy middle of life, not when it was a showroom constructed over a fault-line.

A lot of my writing in the last year has been about coming into the acceptance of life being a riposte of light, dark, light, dark. But maybe this is too linear. Maybe there isn’t such a chronology. Perhaps we do not oscillate between the light and the dark. Perhaps the light and dark exist simultaneously.

Having spent for ever as an all or nothing person — either falling in love or falling apart in complete totality, humming on the plane of high highs or low lows without knowing there is such a thing as a regulated nervous system, this feels entirely new. It feels real. Stronger for its backbone of reality, so far from the un-reality of my past.

There was so much I had to do to get to the boy but he did not come because I had earned him. Why does anything happen to anyone? Through inexplicable luck, wondrous chance and small dashes of courage. Which means when he came, my anchor, my compass, he felt more miraculous than ever.

In March I returned to the lake of the previous autumn. Spring was late to bloom this year, we had not had enough rain for the cherry blossom or daffodils to come out. But like prophecy fulfilled, something else had blossomed instead. I was crossing the stepping stones of the Japanese garden with the boy by my side.

Paula Rego’s mermaids had been packed up and sent back to wherever they had been on loan from. Sometimes breathing on land still feels like a second language rather than my first. We bypass the cosmic titan exhibit that has taken Rego’s place and spend time in the archeological room instead. Peer through cabinets containing exhumed totems from the earth and from history. Pottery from bygone days, tools from towns torn apart. Beauty would always survive. Love would always penetrate destruction. And I know that whatever is to come in this life that is constantly falling apart, holding his hand will always put it back together. That during even the most painful times, there will also be the joy of the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

Life chewed me up and spat me out into the arms of the most perfect man. He fills all these broken parts with laughter and is my daily reminder to tread lighter.

The light and dark exist simultaneously. I think that’s what they call an eclipse.

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I’m calling this month’s playlist “I’m a hurricane I’m a woman in love,” courtesy of Låpsley.