Sunny Reflection

Everything is gonna be alright. I say that recently and am starting to believe it.

There is something irrestibly beautiful in the pain of having suffered unrequited love and servitude. Something in those moments feeds something within that isn't there in the droll of regular relationships. In effect, I think it was probably the greatest expression of love to me I've ever seen, the love pushing me into a better version of myself. We are fueled by this, changed, moved into newness into a better understanding and higher expectation.

None of this ever had anything to the object, the person who, for reasons forever unexplained, couldn;t love me. I've come to understand that freedom lies within learning to forgive them for what they couldn't give. Is there a part of me that used to believe that was the truth? Absolutely. But that needn't be the end, and it never was.

I'm seeing things as this continuous, beautiful climb. There will unfortunately always exist the pain, very real, very persistent, but I can choose now. I have to bury the hope for anything different, but understanding that it was me all along is helping. I will always love the people that color these moments, my mother first and foremost. I will never understand, I will never get closure. But maybe we don't really need these things?

I used to believe I'd one day move onto a family that would give me everything I lacked. When I remember that, all the imaginary plays that kept me surviving in a world that must have been so hard for the child I was, it strikes me as incredibly sad and strong at the same time. I don't believe any of the people that ever got woven into the fantasy could really ever measure up to that belief in the first place. There is an odd calm in the acceptance of that. I gave them more credit than they ever were due.

I will always the be the child of a woman who couldn't love her. But I will also always be original, unique, and inherently different because of this. I owe so much to the child that kept up those fantasies, I owe so much to the things that kept me afloat when I could have given up. People always say you get what you can handle, I see it as true in this fact. And you know, maybe even that horrible lifetime and experience, not so far from my reality now - perhaps just different players, had its purpose after all. Could I have been the woman I am today without being the kid I had to be?

The world doesn't glorify women scorned, doesn't allow for anything of that nature. They don't know enough, I'm convinced.

I was monumentally sad all week after dinner these last two weeks; being around the people who hurt you most is never positive on the surface. B said this week she thinks those people have something to hide - their own normalicy. I can't say I will never long again, I will never feel that inevitable pit in my stomach, the urge to react, but it is a strange and beautiful world I created that I am reacting to. He glorified my speech, ever enthralled with my story-telling, but I think it is flattery out of the pity of not understanding. I used to wish we'd never met. Still do. But the epiphany, the relationship of this to so much of my life's greatest hurts and slights, has me beginning to see this in a new way, understand the bigger picture, and thus, finally, heal. There is a genuine love I will always feel at the memory of him, but it's just that, the memory of something I created in a habituation of an empty and incomplete capacity to connect.

I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life, and I never thought I'd say that, years ago, being where I feared the most. S has texted me more, I love him and S; we understand each other better than I ever realized. I visited everyone in Jersey, and fell in love with the idea that those days are over, and I can close the book. My grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins. Godson, most of all. I was finally able to close the door, and come outside.

My mother moved into my room. The sun still spills in and looks just like it did, she kept the color. I love that place more than I can convey, but there is a strange comfort in not being able to go back where once I saw fear. I'm free. It is that shell that kept me, I finally understand the wall I built.

Maybe there is real love beyond this moment, and relationships I've run from for so long don;t have to be the tangled mess of bore I once believed. Maybe there's been a happy ending all along, and feeling happy is a state that can last, not taken selfishly away by the monsters I lived with.

M told me she wants to go to UPenn. I sincerely hoped, honestly, that she gets in.

Things look beautiful out here, they genuinely do.