Ende

This blog is going on a probably permanent hiatus.  It is meaningless, much like everything else.

"I'm sorry, the feelings just aren't there anymore."

Schmerz

I think this article explains a lot about the physical manifestations of emotional pain I have experienced since K broke up with me.  People always seem confused when I tell them how my stomach hurts so much I can't eat, or that I experience a crushing pain in my chest.  Our minds -- and their emotional health -- are intimately connected with our bodies in ways that many religions and traditions recognize but science often does not.

It is another gray day here on Long Island.  I am trying to stay busy with my schoolwork and ignore the shockingly realistic, heartbreaking dream I had last night.  No, K does not love me anymore.  He has not for a very long time.  It was not real.

Heart Lotus Meditation

Lotus, by Marufish.

I have begun a new evening meditation in order to help me cope with the sadness I still carry with me each day.  As with most of my meditations, I kind of just made it up based on imagery and desired outcome.  I believe becoming more in touch with my heart as an entity to be protected, and more consciously working to heal it, will help yield the progress I seek.

Here is my process:

1. Fold a towel such that it is roughly the length of the area from your hips to your shoulders, and is not folded very thickly.  I fold a long beach towel into thirds from the short end, and then fold it in half lengthwise.
2. Sitting on the floor, position the towel directly behind you and lie back on it, so your spine is cushioned from the sacrum to the base of the neck.  This is a very basic, very gentle heart opening position.
3. Let your feet fall open and rest your arms about a foot from your sides, palms up, thumb and forefinger touching.
4. Become aware of your heart in your chest as you slow your breathing.
5. On an inhale, imagine your heart is a lotus flower: pink, healthy, pure, and vibrant.  Its petals are bright and soft.  For variations, I occasionally imagine I am holding my lotus-heart in my hands, admiring its beauty, or I am stroking its petals, or the air I am breathing in is causing it to open and spread itself wide.
6. On an exhale, let any sickly, withered, or black petals be borne away from your lotus-heart on your breath.  I watch them fade away into the distance.  Sometimes I whisper to myself, "Let the pain go" as my heart sheds some of its heavy darkness.
7. Repeat this process for your meditation.
8. When the timer bell rings, lie quietly, allowing your breath to return to normal, feeling and imagining the radiance in your chest.
9. When you're ready, slowly roll to your right side, cradling your head in your right arm, and pause for a moment, then come up to sit in a cross-legged position, palms together at your chest, to give thanks.

Freuden

The spring weather has been agreeing with me lately.  I derive no end of pleasure in fresh, breezy warmth cosseting my skin.  My bones have felt cold for far too long, and not simply because of winter's unpleasant lingering.

Our cats are enjoying the weather, too.  On any given sunny day, I can find Tabby parked in a spot of sunlight in the kitchen, even if that means lying on the tile floor when her soft fleece bed is a foot away in the shade, or in the square left on the attic carpet from the skylight.  Likewise for Calico; Little Thief is too busy zooming around and being irritating to snooze in one spot for long.

I've been quite sure since at least my undergraduate years that I suffer from some degree of Seasonal Affective Disorder, owing to my restlessness and depression in struggling through the endless Massachusetts winters.  The sunlight, I know, is doing me good.  On Monday I sat on the porch for awhile, my nose stuck in my latest pleasure read, John Adams, and the experience was exceedingly pleasant.  Even the enormous and terrifying bee-like objects hovering around in the bushes in front of me seemed content to leave me be.

I hope to get myself outdoors more often now, although I am not entirely sure what to do with myself.  I don't really have a partner anymore who is willing to go for impromptu walks, or to a park.  This saddens me, but I suppose I must shift my ways and expectations.  Despite a nagging, years-old knee injury, I hope to run again to a limited degree soon, and have been doggedly working out in pursuit of substantially strengthening my legs so that my muscles can stabilize the knee joint.  I do love running, and through everything I have experienced, I consider its absence from my life to be one of the greatest losses I have endured in the past several years.

I have been staying busy in other ways, as I strive to pick up the pieces K left behind in his hasty departure.  I finished John Adams just this morning, all (large-type) 989 pages of it, and found it more inspiring than I would have assumed.  I feel I know the man intimately now -- a testament, certainly, to author David McCollough's talents.  It was only through my trip with K to Colonial Williamsburg last September, and the readings and research I have done in the time since, that I have realized the extent to which learning about and experiencing American history brings me joy.  I dusted my sister's copy of 1776 in about four days over spring break, completely enthralled by it, and that, of course was highly useful to me, distracting me as it did from my recent breakup and crushing loneliness.  I am all the more determined to move to Virginia someday, both to have a better quality of life and so that I may live closer to such important sites of American colonial history.  I can only imagine the rapturous pleasure of living within two hours of Williamsburg, Monticello, Jamestown, and Washington, D.C., among many other places.

As mentioned, I have been working out with wonderful regularity, and with the most determination I have had since before what I have now come to call "the horrible."  My arms are quite toned now, and one workout in particular that I have been dutifully working on for some months is slowly becoming easier.  I also have been eating very healthfully lately, which, of course, has much longer-term, less-noticeable benefits to me, but that I know very well is benefiting me nevertheless.  It is good to feel that, at least in this one aspect of my life, I am making progress and moving forward.  (I suppose I am in school, too; I continue to pull down excellent grades and am nearly completed with my first semester.)

I also have been giving consideration lately to the aftermaths of K and RJ, and how very different my experiences were.  With RJ, I did not so much allow myself to give in to hatred of him but, in fact, wholeheartedly embraced it.  Revenge fantasies dominated my thoughts for far longer than I care to admit, and it took me a very, very, very long time -- indeed, until the end of my relationship with K -- to just legitimately stop caring about anything to do with him.  Of course, my experiences with K were infinitely more positive and affirming, whereas those with RJ were destructive and toxic, so it is natural that the aftermaths would be different.  But I believe very strongly that a large part of the difference in my feelings after all was said and done with both can be explained by the different alignments of my attitude with either.

I have discussed several times here how I cannot and refuse to hate K, despite some legitimate grievances I have with the way he handled things before, during, and after the breakup.  "K is K," I remind myself when he has again disappointed or hurt me, "this is the way he is."  And, with those flaws, he is still someone I really care about and wish well.  I don't believe he is any less or less worthy of a person for his flaws than I am, and there are still many traits of his for which I have great admiration and respect.

In the midst of pain stemming from his words and actions, I have found it beneficial, in a very real way, to redirect those thoughts and instead imagine his face, his gentle mannerisms, the graceful strength of his being.  I cannot help but think tenderly upon him when such images hold court in my mind; feelings of resentment and pride melt away.  It is simply impossible to underscore how significant a development this is, when my modus operandi for the past decade and more has been to lash out in anger when experiencing pain, both, I suppose, as self-defense, to hide my vulnerability, and to strike down the source of my hurt so that they might know my nightmare, as well.

The path of my recovery remains littered with significant obstacles, and so very often I must backtrack, or take the long way around, in order to move forward.  This is a process, swelling with grief, that I would wish upon no one.  But still, I can take a small comfort from the knowledge that I am doing as I ought, that my thought patterns are serving me (and, by extension, K) well instead of poisoning me with impotent hatred.  I have changed so much since my time with RJ, and thankfully so.  I do not ever want to feel such rage against another person again.

My day-to-day existence is soaked with sadness, still, as I mourn what I've lost both in past and future.  But I am trying as hard as I can to find the small joys that exist all around me, even such simple things as boughs everywhere springing into verdancy, a classmate making me laugh, a solid and steady Tree Pose, a good book.

I do not yet know how much longer I will voluntarily stay here, but I do know that, for right now, I am managing.

Gestures

In bed this morning, I rolled over as usual to see what e-mails had arrived for me overnight.  There were the commonplace ones -- ads from Athleta, my Google Calendar updates for the day, more annoying announcements from school.  There was a short but polite one from K, responding to my random e-mail the previous evening, in which I thanked him for the cables he'd bought me some time ago that I only last night got hooked up at long last to pipe picture and sound from my Mac to my TV.  (I christened this new functionality with the iTunes visualizer and my #1 most-played song of all time, VNV Nation's Saviour [Vox], then settled in for an episode of American Experience about FDR.)

And then there was an e-mail alerting me to a comment in need of moderation.  A comment on this blog!

It is the first comment I've ever received.  When I read it, tears sprang to my eyes.  It felt like a tiny pinprick of light had forced its way through the heavy armor of melancholy cloaking my heart.  The unexpectedness of it made it all the more touching.  May it serve as a reminder to me always that even the smallest of gestures can have a profound effect on someone's life.  In a world that, to me, seems filled with hostility and pain, a humble effort can have far-reaching consequences.

How far that little candle throws his beams!

So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

--William Shakespeare

Regression

I have been on a steady decline since the Rammstein concert.  Depression marches in, my weak opposition no match.  I don't know what to do.  I am invisible.  These feelings of helplessness and hopelessness render bleak all that I see.  I meditate and practice yoga frequently, but the pain always overwhelms.  On Thursday, the night of the concert, despite an overall feeling of calmness, I cried through my asanas for the first time ever; I couldn't even relax at the end in Corpse Pose because I could not stop weeping.  There is no shield against my deterioration; nothing to halt or turn back its advance.  I am surrounded by a silence so crushing that it oozes into my pores, fills my lungs with darkness with each struggling breath.

What is the point of this existence, anyway?  How many people, truly, would even notice if I am no longer here? 

I am alone.

And if this was my last post in this blog, no one but the Russian spam bots would know.

Schwere

I have been muddling along.  Interspersed with moments of sunshine, optimism, and goodwill, are times of a heaviness and brokenness I cannot describe.  I long for a time when I can think about the adventures of the last year, the places I've been, the experiences I've had, the images burned forever into my mind's eye, without the physical sensation that my chest is cracking open.

I awoke this morning with the thought, Oh good, it's over, I made it, until I remembered that it wasn't over, it was tonight.  "It" is a Rammstein concert just west of the city that K and I were supposed to attend with his brother and sister-in-law.  I went with him to the last show, in December, and we had an amazing time.  I was with K as he bought the tickets for tonight's show, was there when he surprised his brother and sister-in-law with the knowledge that he had bought them tickets too, and had been eagerly looking forward to it for months; I had acquired and organized the band's entire discography on iTunes so that I could listen to them often and get myself very familiarized with the music.

At the December show, a band I really like, Combichrist, was opening for Rammstein.  Thanks to poor timing on our part, we got into the seating area of Madison Square Garden about an instant after Combichrist had left the stage.  I was bitterly disappointed.

Guess who's opening for Rammstein tonight, then?  And guess who's not going?

I had kind of expected K to invite me to the show tonight, regardless of what was happening between us.  While I didn't pay for anything, that was, after all, my ticket.  I don't know if he's just eating the cost of it or has found someone to replace me.  There is no ill will between us, just pain, so why would he deny me this?  It's just one more way he hurts me, whether he means to or not.  Our actions always have consequences, regardless of intentions.  I don't know if I would have accepted that offer from him if he had made it, but the kindness of such a gesture would have meant a great deal to me.  Truly, it was the least he could do.

I guess I just need to accept the loss of this amazing experience I should have been able to have tonight, just like I have to accept every other loss that is forced upon me.  I am doing my utmost not to harbor any bitterness against K over this and the many other ways he led me to believe that there was a future for us when he already knew there was not, but it is a struggle.  I cried, telling him I felt I was one mistake away from him abandoning me, and he told me that was not true.  I cried, physically unable to stand, from the thought of losing him, and he held me, saying I was not going to.  Mere weeks before he broke up with me, he was telling realtors during our open house expeditions that the house he was buying was going to be for both of us; when asked if we were going to be married, he replied, "Working on it."  Was he, by that time?  I think that it was around February when our fate was sealed and I had already lost him, although I did not know it then.  But surely he did, and he was buying us concert tickets and telling realtors about his plans and talking with me about what we would be doing later this year, and it was a lie.  All of it was a lie.  How that hurts.  If only I had known what was in store, what he was hiding in his heart.

I know I sound angry, and I suppose that I am.  After how close and serious our relationship had been, he couldn't even break up with me in person: it was over the phone.  Despite knowing of my suicidal intentions, he did nothing to ensure my safety, nor to follow up with me in the days following to see if I was alright, preferring instead to "disappear" for a time.  When informed of Mousie's passing and of the myriad other tragedies occurring in my family, his immediate response was to take issue with the admittedly awkward way I had prefaced the conversation, rather than to express sympathy and caring for all that I had been through since he'd left.  It's hard not to be angry when he is the sole reason why I am in so much pain, why my life has become borderline meaningless.  But I will not succumb to this anger.  I don't want to and I am not going to, but it is difficult, and I don't think he realizes that.  I think there are many things he does not realize.

I have begun countering any destructive emotions that arise by actively bringing to mind feelings of love, caring, sympathy, and well wishes for him -- all feelings that exist vibrantly within me still, despite what I have gone through.  He is again denying me happiness with the concert tonight, but I do genuinely hope he has a wonderful time, even if I need to be in one of my sunshine spots to realize that I feel this way.  I do want him to be happy; I want him to build and live a life where he feels stable, satisfied, fulfilled, and content.  The degree to which I care about him has not diminished even slightly in all of the time he has been in my life.  I think I will be ready soon to begin sending light to him during my daily meditations -- a task that will help heal me, as well.

Enjoy the concert for me tonight, K.

Crack

I have the music from Link's house on Outset Island in Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, where Granny is heartbroken, stuck in my head at the moment, which I suppose is apropos because that sad, slow dirge is very much how I am feeling right now.

I had a much rougher day of things than I'd expected.  K has been on my mind endlessly, an ephemeral ghost perched on my shoulder, intangible yet crushing me beneath his weight, hovering always over me no matter where I am and what I am doing.  The almost careless detachment is pain beyond imagining.  I am beginning to detect a very strong vibe from him that he just wants me to shut up and go away...that he is regretting being nice to me and saying that he had no intentions of "vanishing" on me.

What on Earth did I do to deserve this?  Why did this relationship, to which I gave my best and my all, end the same way as the others where I wasn't even trying?  I still don't think K has even an inkling how deeply and thoroughly he was loved and appreciated.  If he ever read even a miniscule sampling of my LiveJournal entries, his heart would probably shatter.  He told me once, not that long ago, that no one had ever loved him as I had.  I pray, for his sake, that that is not true for the rest of his life.

I went to my favorite, extremely expensive store at the mall today, and somehow managed to not buy anything.  (The lack of sale items or other items in my size helped.)  I am finally (and not a moment too soon) realizing that the purchase of material goods, no matter how wonderful, will not plug up the holes in my heart or take the pain away.  I knew this rationally, of course, but emotionally, it was a different matter.  Many a time, all it takes to stop myself from salivating over some $98 pair of pants is to tell myself, "shut up and go meditate."

And meditate I have been.  I use an app on my Android phone to both time and record my sessions, and the log indicates that the sessions have really been piling up.  I usually meditate two or more times per day now, not including any meditative segments of the yoga DVDs I use.  Yoga comes in two or more sessions also, on most days.

Something interesting I noticed the other day was that, after I had gone most of the day with neither, I felt unsettled, uneasy, unmoored.  It was like some part of me -- my body, my mind, my heart, I know not which -- was craving an anchor, either on my yoga mat or parked nearby on a pillow with my phone at my side, quietly ringing its bells to start and stop.  It seems that the two methods I have selected to try to usher me through the heartache of losing K are rapidly integrating themselves into my life such that I readily notice their occasional absence.  I am unclear on if this is a good or a bad thing, but I know, at least, that these are better things from which to be experiencing withdrawal than drugs, alcohol, random hookups, or other unhealthy habits.  Maybe these current habits will stick with me, this time.

I still haven't found the strength to perform any heart-opening poses, known to be difficult for those suffering from emotional trauma.  I hope I can soon; my chest feels tight, closed, locked down to shut even well-meaning souls like K out forever.

I wonder if he is reading this.  I wonder if he knows.

Losses

"Ted," a friend of mine since my first year of college, told me once that April is the worst month of the year, filled as it is with pain and losses.  She would know.  She is from Littleton, Colorado, and while she did not attend Columbine, she had many friends who did, and lost many of them.  As for me, I had my own experiences with April losses: my beloved cat Weezie had died April 19, 2000.  Weezie had been my constant companion for ten years; I picked her out at the town shelter only three months after my father passed away when I was six.

And now we come again to April, a month where K rapidly departed from my life, a month where LB is struggling severely with depression, a month where a grad school classmate I have befriended, "JR," is struggling with a personal tragedy of her own.  And now we have my cat, Mousie, who is in the end stages of renal failure and will be put to sleep tomorrow, by the same vet who cared for Weezie for so long.  "One woe doth tread upon another's heel, So fast they follow."

Life has been passing along.  I do not cry each day anymore.  Last night was, I believe, the first night K did not come to me in my dreams.  In my dream, a young man I have never met in real life befriended me, flirted with me, made me feel special and wanted.  By the end of the dream, I had fallen into an easy rapport with him, and felt loved and protected.  When I awoke, feeling confused and an ache in my chest of experiencing another "loss," I realized that that dream served an important role for me: it allowed me to "try on" the concept of allowing another man to care for and about me, to let someone besides K into my heart.  It showed me, in such spectacularly realistic fashion that several times today I had to remind myself that I was still single, that when the time comes, I will be able to experience with someone else the closeness and love I felt with K.  That time is a ways off yet, but it has instilled a small bit of confidence in me that I will be able to recover from this pain and move on.

The moving on thing has caused me no small amount of grief.  Similar to what I will likely experience in the days to come, when I will feel guilty for smiling, as though I am dishonoring Mousie's memory in finding some small pleasure, I feel guilt at the thought of moving on.  Moving on seems to signal that I never cared for K at all, that my love for him was fleeting or shallow, that if I do not spend the rest of my life in mourning for what I have lost, then nothing I felt for him was real.  It's a destructive mindset, to be sure.  I believe that K wants me to be happy.  I believe that Mousie wants me to be happy.  When I am ready, I want to find another young man who will love and support me, share life with me, grow with me, grow old with me.  I still want that person to be K, but if he does not want that, then I have no choice but to let him go and wish him the best happiness life can offer.  He is and always will be very dear to me, priceless beyond all accounting, and I hope to the bottom of my heart that he will know nothing but joy and good health until the end of his days.  Even after everything, I know for sure that that is what he deserves.  He is a good man, the likes of which I will never meet again.

I have been meditating and practicing yoga with a fervor not seen since before I met K.  (These practices fell by the wayside once things with him became serious.)  For weeks now, I have meditated by lying in my bed, cozy under my blankets, and placing both palms over my heart.  As I breathe in, I feel light gathering in my hands.  As I breathe out, I let the light from my hands spill through my chest, like dye being fed into a glass of water with a dropper, and let the warmth and light surround my heart, nourishing and healing it.  My heart, you see, has been a sad, gasping, dying thing, black and lying lifelessly in a pool of blood.  K tore part of it away, and that part of it will never return: there is a gaping wound there now; there are many cuts and holes besides from the other losses I have endured.  My heart has not so much clung to life as watched the life ebb away, closing its eyes, awaiting death.  But death has not come, and I do not know why.  It is my job now to nurture my heart, give it strength, show it how to keep beating even when this big piece is now gone forever, held in K's hands, maybe tucked in his pocket, maybe sitting on a shelf to collect dust.  Amputees can perhaps learn to walk again; my heart can perhaps learn to carry on.  With this breathing, I felt the heat in my chest, except this time, it was a healing heat, not a destructive pain.  Every night I have meditated this way, laboring to bring color and life back to my wounded organ.  The cold grip of sorrow still holds court, but it will not always.  No; the light will conquer the darkness.  In time, I will have the strength to send my beams of light to K, to, perhaps, help him heal, too.  I do not know what he is experiencing right now, but I have nothing to lose in sending him my caring and love, even if it is not needed anymore or never was.  He, after all, will hold a piece of my heart unto the final end.

Panaceas

I poked around on Google today to look for some wisdom on how to recover from a broken heart.  The advice ran the gamut: go party and get wasted and sleep with tons of guys so I forget my ex!  Or get all dolled up, go out with my girlfriends, and remind myself that I'm fabulous.  Or buy this program that will guarantee I'll feel 100% better and ready to date again within a week, or for this much extra, our foolproof method will have your ex begging to come back.  I have tons of people pushing antidepressants on me or encouraging me to trash-talk K because hating is easier than hurting.  The better advice out there talks about deep breaths, yoga and meditation, baby steps, gentle self-care, cry when I need to but otherwise carry on.

The truth is, there is no panacea.  I either put a bullet between my eyes or I continue to exist.  What that existence entails is another matter altogether.  Some people seem to think that the fact that I am alive is more important than whether I am living.  Some, I guess...don't seem to much care whether I'm around or not.

I don't want to go on antidepressants again and have been resisting this call no matter how many times it is raised.  To medicate once more will seem a defeat.  I was so happy to have met K in those early days last year that I felt confident enough to begin weaning myself off of them.  It was a long, difficult process, but I made it through, and have not experienced any withdrawal effects in some time.  I suppose, to return to them now, would make me feel as though the months between late May 2010 and now never happened.  Sometimes it seems that they didn't, like my time with K was a brief, joyful dream, and now I have awoken once more to the cold shadow of dawn.

I do things every day that are supposed to be helping me recover.  I took a walk with Mom.  I saw LB, my friend of roughly sixteen years.  We all had dinner together.  She brought me a bouquet of flowers.  They are sitting on my dresser now, and remind me of the flowers K used to buy me.  She did a yoga routine with me, but it didn't help much.  I'll meditate again before bed tonight, but that will not help much.  None of this is helping me much.  Nothing takes away that stabbing emptiness of loss, not even sleep, where K visits me in my dreams every night, sometimes to sit with me, sometimes to tell me again that he does not love me anymore.  Nothing will bring K back.  This is my world now.  This is the reality I do not have the courage to escape.

Are We Dreaming There Are Better Days To Come?

I began this blog some months ago in order to chronicle my recovery efforts from an emotionally abusive relationship.  I started it a bit too late, however; most of my recovery had already been completed.  I was happily in a relationship.  I began grad school.  My life, in many ways, was upended, but in ways that I was largely able to foresee, in ways that I welcomed.  I navigated those new waters as best as I could.  I felt that I was doing well, and this blog, suddenly, seemed irrelevant.  I stopped posting.

One week ago, K broke up with me.  He told me he had fallen out of love with me.  We had had our issues, as any couple does, but what I felt were simply bumps in the road, he felt very deeply.  I did not know how bad things had become until late February.  K is not one to make known his grievances, and so I had no opportunity to redress many of them.  He told me that he was thinking about breaking up with me.  I managed to convince him not to do so, and we continued on uneasily for another month, with me on my best behavior.  In late March, he actually did try to break up with me, but again I convinced him not to do so.  Last week, he did it for good, holding fast to what he believed was best for both of us, and I have not heard from him since then.

To describe this place I have inhabited for the last seven days as agony would be to vastly understate the matter.  It seems that the tears do not stop flowing.  I have had panic attacks, been unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to function.  My hip bones are jutting out.  This is pain of a magnitude I never thought it was possible to experience.  When I lost RJ, as painful as that was, I knew that I was, in actuality, ridding myself of a boy who was selfish, immature, cruel, uninteresting, and most of all, not worthy of me.  None of these things apply to K.  This is an actual loss, a loss causing me so much grief and pain that I feel sometimes like I have forgotten how to live.  K was quiet, tender, caring.  Intelligent, talented, perpetually fascinating, and worthy of a respect I do not give many.  Handsome, fit, strong enough to defend me from harm, but gentle enough to wrap me in his arms.  He almost single-handedly restored my faith in humanity, and in love.  This was not only one of the few souls on Earth I knew I could be with forever, but one of the even fewer that I wanted to be with forever.

All of that is gone now.  It is completely unclear to me if I will ever see or hear from him again.  He knew I was planning my suicide, and yet has not contacted me to see if I am still alive.  It feels like I am being treated as though I was unfaithful, or committed some horribly cruel act.  I made mistakes in our relationship, yes, but they were not large ones.  I do not know what I did wrong except to love someone more fully and wholly than I ever have in my life.

Suddenly, sadly, this blog is relevant again.  I still do not know if I am going to kill myself someday, but I do not want to.  It is not that I want to stop living, it is that I want to stop living with my heart in so much anguish.  And so, though it is early days yet, I find myself turning to those things that somehow, against all odds, carried me through RJ's departure.  I will need them more than ever; this is a far vaster undertaking.  K did not destroy my self and my sense of self-worth as RJ did.  In the ways, unique to him, that he was able, he helped build me up again.  Losing that, and in what still seems to me such an arbitrary way, has of course shaken my foundations.  I wonder many times if I am lovable at all, and what is wrong with me that even a man I gave everything to still rejected me, and why I am so worthless that K has not concerned himself even once with verifying that I am still on this Earth.  All of those things hurt in ways I cannot describe, and no amount of other people telling me how great I am can drown out K's silence.  Maybe he doesn't even platonically care about me anymore; maybe he never loved me at all; maybe he is not the man I thought he was.  But I do not want to believe those things.  I do not want to have my trust in others shattered again.  K's parents raised him and his brothers well.  I never saw evidence that they were the sort of sorry excuses for human beings that RJ was.

Perhaps, right now, K is suffering, too.  Perhaps he has stayed away from me because it is too difficult for him to be around me when he knows I am hurting so badly because of what he's done.  I don't know.  Maybe I never will know.  But I hope that my understanding of him, of a wonderful, smart, handsome, funny, loving, utterly irreplaceable man, will shine brightly always.

With a heart weighed down with darkness, I now must set about picking up the pieces once more.  My life depends on it.

Stillness

Okay, let's just get this out of the way now: I hate winter.  I absolutely cannot stand it.  I've lived in New York all of my life, with a brief stint in Massachusetts for college, so you'd think I would be used to it by now.  Instead, I find I dislike it more every year.  I hate the snow; it looks beautiful for about three minutes and after that is just filthy and in your way.  I hate the static, the dry skin that burns in a different spot with every movement, the chapped and bleeding lips, the itchy sweaters and constricted movement.  But most of all, I hate the cold.  I hate how it causes me to curl into myself, hunching forward, all of the muscles on my back tensed.  It's deeply uncomfortable and exhausting.  I seem to be far more sensitive to lower temperatures than the average person: when other people are comfortable, my teeth are chattering, but when other people are boiling to death, I am quite at peace.  This sensitivity seems to get more and more pronounced as I age.  I'm not sure why this is, but I remember at age 13 or so, I suited up, went outside, and crawled around the backyard for three hours pretending I was a polar bar struggling for survival on the frigid tundra.  I seem to have managed pretty well just then, but maybe that was because, back then, I didn't have "grown-up worries" like shoveling, inclement weather driving, or using personal days in order to stay home from work to be concerned about.

Against all odds, however, recently I have managed to find a redeeming value in winter: the stillness.  Oh, what a beautiful thing it is.  Everything is muffled after a snowfall.  Flora and many fauna are sleeping, tuned in to the earth's gentle cycles.

I began cottoning on to this peaceful and delightful aspect of winter a few years ago, a bit before Christmas.  I was housesitting for my mom while the rest of my family was away vacationing.  I stood at the kitchen sink, washing a few dishes, and admired the merry crowd of birds that had gathered on the other side of the driveway in the snow to feast on the just-filled contents of the four bird feeders.  It was such a joy to watch them as I worked, and I thought to myself how wonderful it would be to have a house somewhere in the woods of New England, to live alone, and walk amid the snowy trees, feeling present and alive.  And so my second novel was born.
I receive various e-mails and publications regarding yoga, meditation, or, more broadly, living an examined and mindful life.  I have noticed, in various places now, articles about the stillness of winter, and what lifestyle changes such a quiet, introspective season is guiding us towards.  I have sought to incorporate these changes into my own lifestyle.  One day, I meditated during daylight for the first time in quite a long while; I opened the blinds on my window to have a good view of the bare branches outside, and let the sun shine warmly on my face.  That was a very special meditation.  I redoubled my efforts to practice yoga more often, as my commitment to it had been flagging as of late.  It is mostly passive, restorative yoga that I practice now.  And, twice, I have utilized new mental imagery during my meditations, to bring my body and mind into balance with the season.
I sit on my pillow as usual, and then imagine a pond.  This pond has frozen over; it is surrounded by freshly fallen snow and tall, shadowed conifers, the entire scene sparkling beneath a full moon.  I think about how silent everything in this scene is, and feel to a very deep part of my being the stillness of the slumbering earth.  I imagine I am at the bottom of that pond (my gently burbling steam vaporizer helps with this), seated in the sand, feeling the minute currents that barely stir my hair.  The fish and other aquatic creatures nearby are all resting quietly along with me.  There is almost no sound to be heard; we, like a bear in her den, are all quiet in body and mind, conserving our energy, awaiting the awakening of spring.
These two mental visions -- of the pond from the surface and then of my vantage point in its depths -- are all deeply relaxing.  It becomes something I can sense and actually feel instead of something I ponder with logic.  This meditation helps me to discover, for myself, what is so special about winter.  Perhaps, with practice, I will come to tolerate or even embrace it, despite the problems it presents.

Namaste.