Eventually Alone Won’t Feel So Lonely

This morning I woke up in my own bed. A bed that I worked two weeks to buy when he told me the one we shared no longer belonged to me. I got up and walked around my empty apartment, it’s rooms didn’t feel so empty anymore. I listened to the sound the wood-planked floor made when it met my bare feet.

It fit, finally.

Heartbreak can make us feel displaced, even in our own skin. It makes us feel like we don’t live there anymore. It makes us feel like we’re too unworthy to feel at home again. But the most beautiful thing about an uprooting is the rebuild. More often than not the place you settle back into is even more perfect than the place you left.

I let heartbreak knock my world down to just it’s foundational structure. I watched the walls crumble around me. I watched the windows shatter. I didn’t get off my knees long enough to salvage any of it. When the storm had passed, I pulled myself from the piles of shit to assess the damage. It looked just like it felt: wrecked.

So, one day at a time I filled the hole he’d left with things I loved. I filled the extra space with all the things I’d never made time for and all the projects I’d never finished. I committed myself to the rebuild.

Eventually I began to wake up to an alone that didn’t feel so lonely and a silence that was more peaceful than heart wrenching. I woke up in skin I recognized.

Today I’ll make breakfast in my underwear. Not because he might think it’s sexy, but because it makes me feel sexy. I’ll find time to write about something other than him and read poetry that has to do with love without wanting to light the book on fire.

Today I’ll be messy. The good kind of messy. I’ll leave the egg shells on the counter and the pan on the stove because it is my space, not ours anymore.

And today he won’t be around to tell me how to cut the vegetables, but even if he was, I would do it sloppy — the way I do everything I don’t give a fuck about.

I won’t ask him what he wants, not because he’s not here, but because I care more about what I want.

I won’t need him to make me feel strong or beautiful. I just am those things. They belong to me.