Where Do I Go From Here
Thoughts on finally listening to my deepest longing and telling the stories I am here to tell
We are lying in bed together. The room is filled with palo santo and sage smoke, and the sound of singing bowls can still be heard ringing out from my phone in the other room. My eyes are nearly swollen shut from hours of hot, salty tears. As I look at him, I notice that his are too. I wonder if I look as bone-tired as he looks; I wonder if these last few months have taken as much from him as they have taken from me.
“Where are you going to go?” he asks in a near whisper.
“I don’t know”, I hesitate, nervous to actually speak of this future where we are no longer together. “I was thinking I might go to Portugal for a few months…” my voice trails off.
“I think that’s amazing. You should write your book there,” he says in his steady, quiet way that I’ve spent four years softening into.
“What book?”
“Whichever one you’re ready to write,” his faint smile makes me feel calm and unmoored. How many moments has that same, slow smile been my fulcrum? I feel a weary part of my heart yearn for what has now clearly become so broken.
I don’t know how to respond to this, so I just nod slowly.
After a few drawn out moments of breathing and staring into each others eyes, I muster a response,
“Yeah… I suppose that’s what I’ll do.”
It occurs to me that this is actually happening — we have just celebrated our four year anniversary a few days ago, and now we are ending our relationship. We are discussing where I am going to go because we both already know there is no way I am staying here in Arkansas. We both know that I will go as far away from this place as possible — and we also both know that this will not be an escape but I step closer to myself. We both know that I will feel more at home in some far-flung country than here. This place and this relationship is no longer my home.
Just minutes ago, I finally said the words aloud, “So, we are no longer engaged. We’re no longer going to get married. We are not together.”
As I slowly articulated each word. I couldn’t tell if I was asking a question or making a statement.
We are no longer engaged? We are not going to be together?
Now, we are staring at each other in bed. There is nothing left to say. Or, I suppose the only thing left to ask is where do we go from here?
And then he smiles softly at me again and says, “I can’t wait to have a signed copy of your book one day.”
My breath catches in my throat and burns. I think I am about to heave or wail or something else entirely. I am taken aback when I open my mouth and the heave releases from my body as laughter — bold, dry, desperate laughter.
Years before this moment—before proposals, and baby names, and cross-country moves—I am twenty-five years old, and I’m standing on the corner of Knickerbocker and Lorimer in Brooklyn. The January air is nipping at my cheeks and turning them rose-colored. I am pressing my body into a different man’s body — desperate for this moment to stretch out indefinitely — knowing that it will not. It is 2019, and I am about to get in a rental car and leave New York City. I am leaving my home for the last six years to move over seven thousand miles away to East Africa. But I cannot even think about that. All I can think about is that I am leaving a man that I will spend the rest of my life wondering about. Will I ever get to love him all the way? Will I regret leaving him and choosing myself?
The night before, we had gone to a dinner in the West Village. It was bitterly cold, and we walked quickly from the subway with our bodies pressed close together to fend off the wind. For months now, every moment we had together was cast in the light of my impending departure — we met only five months before I was accepted to join the Peace Corps in Tanzania. This ticking clock heightened the intensity and passion of our time together — we could never escape the sense that we were constantly running out of time. This is the last time we’re going to walk together like this, I yearned to be able to hold his hand, but the winter wind wouldn’t allow for it.
We arrived at some Italian restaurant he’d been telling me about since we’d met. He kept a list of restaurants and bars in an Excel spreadsheet on his phone which I found ridiculous and delightful. He had a ranking system and would often reference this spreadsheet late at night when we were hopping between late night dinners and cocktail lounges.
Stepping into the vestibule of the restaurant, I felt the heart wrap around my body like a welcoming furnace. The windows were being pelted with snow, and there was a fire burning towards the back of the dining area. The wood-paneled walls made the space feeling like a den — homey and inviting — and candlelights danced over the white marble tables.
We were tucked into the far corner of the restaurant and could barely hear the low murmuring of the three other parties that had found refuge there that night. We slowly sipped red wine and picked at truffle risotto — a final attempt at normalcy. The make-believe we’d been playing at for months now — pretending we weren’t in love and I wasn’t leaving.
In a sad attempt to extend the moment as long as possible, we ordered another glass of pinot noir after dinner. There was so little to say by then, so instead we were standing vigil for the love that we knew we wouldn’t have.
In the morning, standing on the street corner, it feels like a relief to finally arrive at this moment. We’d fallen in love over the course of ten months in a state of suspension — never actually being able to land in the love that we’d felt for one another. What would it have been like to love him without the thought of leaving?
“Here,” he whispers in my ear and then presses an envelope into my shaky hands.
“What is it?” I manage to ask through tears.
“Just a note,” he leans towards me and kisses me deeply, “Alright lady, I’ll see you.”
“I love you,” I say, barely audible.
He nods, “I love you too,” and with that he turns and walks towards the subway.
I clutch the envelope to my chest.
I’ve always wondered what I would have done if he’d asked me to stay. But the truth is, I’ve also always known the answer to that question — I would have still gone. I would choose to go to Tanzania over and over and over again in every single lifetime. Despite the immense, bone-breaking heartache, I would choose it over again. At the time, though, I craved so desperately to hear him ask me to stay — as if asking me to stay would show me just how much he loved me. It’s only now with hindsight and perhaps a few years of maturity that I can see so clearly that this is the most loving thing this man could have done — loved me enough to let me go and celebrate me as I did so, regardless of the pain it caused him.
I’d left him with small pieces of our time together — little talismans that I thought could guide him back or at the very least remind him that I was ever there in the first place. Paintings, letters, books, crystals, mason jars filled with words — small reminders of our time spent suspended together.
And he left me with this — an envelop with a letter inside. The last line, “I can’t wait to have a signed copy of your book one day.”
Now, six years later, I am lying in bed next to the man I thought I’d marry and he has just uttered these same exact words to me.
I place my hand on his cheek and nod. I am not sure if he can see in my eyes how liberated and desperate this sentiment has made me. Can he tell that with those words he both released me and confirmed something I fear most?
I slide from the bed and make my way over towards the bathroom.
“I’m going to shower,” I say, closing the door behind me. In the last few weeks, as it became clear that we were separating, I had stopped undressing in front of him. After years of walking around the house naked, at total ease in my skin, I was now cautious with my body.
Standing in the shower, I let the hot water flow down my back. I turn my face up to the stream of water and close my eyes. I can tell that I am crying but the water rinses the tears away just as soon as they begin to fall. I can’t wait to have a signed copy of your book one day, the words keep reverberating in my mind.
And then a painful, gasp comes out of me — a primal, anguished cry.
I keel over and notice my entire body is trembling. Slowly, I slide onto the floor of the tub. Now I can taste the tears as they paint themselves across my cheeks.
“I would give up writing all the books in the world if it meant I could have the love and partner that I want,” I whisper hopelessly and my words are shallowed by the dark emptiness of the bathroom.
But just as the words come out of my mouth, I already know that this is not true.
It is no surprise that these two men — spread across the years of my life — have uttered the same exact words to me. After all, anyone who knows me knows that my deepest desire is to write. I am not demure about this desire. These men have watched me ride the waves of inspiration and toil in self-doubt about whether I can actually fulfill this dream. These words are a benediction from both of these men—the blessing of permission to tell my stories.
The word “fulfill” comes from the Old English “to make full; a sense of completion; to satiate.” What I desire most—to fulfill my dream of being a writer—is the thing I feel would satiate me more than any thing else, and all the while the thing I am most afraid of.
I am afraid to claim this desire in the same way a person stranded in a desert, desperate and thirsty, is unable to believe that the oasis on their map will, in fact, be there when they arrive. They have proof—the can see it so clearly right in front of them—but the road there is too uncertain, and they’re afraid they might die of thirst along the way. They wonder, “Why not just stop here? Maybe someone will find me. Maybe it will rain.” But even as they try to calm themselves with these platitudes, they know that this is not the way. The way is through. What exists at the end of this journey is more abundance and water than they could have ever dreamed possible.
Something shifts in my body and a wave of calm comes over me. Why am I so quick to concede the thing I long for most in this world? Why am I so quick to doubt the presence of the water when I can see it so clearly on my map? A quiet, knowing laugh comes out.
The water starts to turn cold, and I stand back up and let it pour over my body. The fact that these men have both offered me the gift of encouragement to pursue my dream does not mean I am incapable of doing so while also having the enduring partnership that I crave.
Instead, these words are a rallying cry from the universe to actually do the thing I say I desire most deeply — to write and tell stories; to stop letting other things get in the way of this dream; to no longer be afraid that this insatiable longing is too big or too bold or too anything.
In their words, both of these men delivered one of the most sacred messages that I could receive as an aspiring writer — If I lived it, I get to write about it; I have the ability to alchemize my pain, and joy, and grief, and life into stories, and doing so is perhaps one of the greatest forms of love.
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Heartbreaks to continue on one's own life journey and calling, the constant stream of hellos and goodbyes, the love-painted plans that never pan out as new plans--that were probably always there whispering in the background--take shape; so relateable.