It’s early, just after five in the morning, and I’ve been up since a little after two. In bed, reading, my brain too on fire for sleep to reclaim me but I can still feel the mind-numbing weight behind my eyes. It’ll be an interesting day, for sure, trying to keep alert and aware. Thankfully, I only have a call with a friend tonight, instead of my usual going out with a friend, or yoga, or late-night movie nights with long talks, stiff drinks, and a bit of a reliving of my college days, when the world felt full and ripe, ready for the plucking.
I don’t have these awakenings often anymore, when sleep eludes me in the witching hours. When I was with my ex, they happened frequently, a few times a week. I can almost trace the course of our relationship over what caused the early morning rises, follow the fault lines of our love by our sleeping habits, where those first few weeks when we slept close in my double bed to those last weeks, me barely sleeping at all alone in the twin bed in my office, packing boxes muffling the tears, eyes rimmed red and raw, the ex a floor below, alone, in our king size bed. That was a year ago this month, and I think about how much has changed. I wonder who I will allow into my bed now, who the next person I want to share that time with, forgo sleep and habits and patterns for. I’m not there yet, and it has nothing to do with the ex, more to do with what and who and where I want to be. Another person in my bed is just going to sully that up, make me consider someone else’s needs, and wants, and habits. Not yet.
The ex–let’s just call her Jewel, for the sake of simplicity, for the sake of distance and comfort for me–made the first move, and I was hooked immediately. I had adored her for the past year, her calm demeanor, her deliberateness, her wise counsel and stunning beauty. She seem untouched by the world around her, a woman wafting through the streets of New York, making it her own. She was eight years my junior, and I admired how put-together she seemed. I myself had just uprooted my life from the comparatively sleepy Boston suburbs, a stone’s throw from where Thoreau wrote Walden, into the heart of the lion’s den of New York City. I was a wild woman: cowboy boots, tattoos, could drink like any man, would walk the streets of NYC from 25th St and 5th Ave, all the way up to 143rd and Riverside, where I lived, at all hours of the night. I was alive and infused, the streets raucous and rampant with people and sights and the endless movement. Jewel was my mentor at work, the one who helped me navigate the company I had joined as CTO, helped me with understanding NYC. We became friends, in surface, and I didn’t give dating her a second thought because she was straight. In fact, I thought she might get along with my brother. But the pandemic started and Jewel flew back to California to wait it out with her mother in her childhood home. We kept in touch over video sporadically; a lot of this time is lost to memory and the first months of the pandemic, when the city shut down and the constant movement I had gotten used to turned into a stillness that I was no longer used to and wholly unprepared to handle in a landscape of concrete and steel.
Jewel came back in the middle of the summer, to say good-bye to the city, pack her apartment, and move permanently back to California. Around this time, the executive team decided to go out for the first time in six months; we had been getting together in the office, just the six of us, in the office every Tuesday. Summer nights and being outdoors allowed us to gather, to see one another outside of work, celebrate making it as far as we had. Jewel was invited out with us. When Jewel walked into the restaurant’s atrium, my insides exploded. I could tell she was excited to see me, watched that smile of hers spread wide, the eyes crinkling. We ended the night walking hand-in-hand in Central Park. She was a straight girl and I was not. I can’t remember if we kissed that night, I don’t think we did, but I felt like I was sixteen again, heart like a piston, stomach a butterfly pavilion, all the old cliches because they are true. A lot happened between the beginning of August and the beginning of October, and I fell madly in love just in time for her to move back to California for good. Walking away from her hotel room the morning she was to leave, after having spent a fitful night in bed, making love, being held in her arms, telling her I loved her for the first time, with her quiet response of “I know,” was hard. The tears didn’t stop, and riding the PATH back to Jersey City where my car was, I hid my face behind sunglasses even in the midst of the rain. I should have known then to end it, to keep it buttoned up as a wild love affair, an episode that had a clear beginning and a finite end. But I am a woman of possibility, to see that things are unwritten and the future isn’t something planned. There is no exactitude in life. And, quite honestly, I didn’t want that feeling to end, the feeling of home that I felt in her arms. Though, again, looking back I can see how that feeling of home always felt tremulous, uncertain. There was always an edge to it, her uncertainty and inability to tell me things actually told me things I didn’t want to hear, that I actively shut out.
One thing led to another over the next six months, our conversations over Google Meet growing, her coming out to the sleepy, rural town I had moved to ninety minutes from the city for six weeks to try out being with each other. I asked her not to waste my time, while secretly wanting her to waste it all. I wanted her to consume it all, make it hers, make me hers. In April of 2021, she moved in with me, the large four bedroom farmhouse finally full of life, of her dog, of the beginning tendrils of a family. Those first few weeks, we slept in my double bed, bodies entwined with each other, breath hot on our skin, and I woke early, smelling like her, the wonder of her being there a constant source of amazement. But Jewel didn’t like the cramped bed, and I couldn’t blame her, felt the need for some space. We went to the mattress store and Jewel dropped a couple grand on a king size bed, proof positive that she was in it for the long haul, and I felt my heart become lighter again. This woman chose me. I’m worth something after all.
Looking back on this, I now feel this was probably more a burden on Jewel than a welcome feeling. Up until this past year, I had looked for validation of who I was, who I am, from those outside me. There are reasons for this and I may get into them at some point, but it’s sufficient to know that how I felt about myself: my self-worth, my lovability, my worthiness came from outside of me. It wasn’t anything explicit I said, wasn’t even something I knew at the time. The need for other people’s approval and validation was hidden from myself but manifested in my disappointment in people, in the demands to put as much effort as I did, to show up for me the way I showed up for them.
They say there is always one person in a relationship that loves the other more and I was definitely the one. As W.H. Auden wrote:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.The More Loving One
I was the star that burned brighter. Jewel couldn’t return the same, didn’t have the capacity to return, or maybe just didn’t feel that strongly about me. Reciprocity only went so far as chores in that relationship. That clawing neediness of mine, the lack of depth with her, the inability to say what we thought, to have hard conversations of truth…I found myself tempering my emotions and words, calling it emotional regulation, but truly I felt stifled, like our love and relationship had to be constantly managed and massaged, afraid of saying the wrong thing, afraid of not being who Jewel expected me to be. Looking back on it now, more than a year later, I can see this was both the best and worst relationship I have ever been in. The things that affect us the most often contain these juxtapositions.
But this isn’t about our relationship, so much as it is from the recovery. I write the above because you must understand how much I loved this woman and was scared of losing her, how much credence I put into the relationship and my definition of worth. When we ended it, the bottom of my world dropped and I was in a horrific free fall. Jesus, I don’t think I can convey how my world truly fucking exploded. That this past year has been my beautiful, heartbroken year is no lie; as I wrote, the things that affect us the most contain opposites, contain multitudes.
This past year…well, it’s been one of intense hurt and discoveries. The ending of that relationship and no longer having Jewel in my life woke something up in me. Things started to change, new neural pathways, my body reconstituting itself, how I moved in the world and spoke to people and that neediness that plagued me up until this past year fell away, allowed me to be fully present with another human without requiring validation from them. I started to understand that the responsibility to love one’s self could only lie with me; that the shame and hurt and the people who were supposed to love me unconditionally and not doing so wasn’t to blame for my thinking that I wasn’t worth it. That was all me.
The breakup was the catalyst for me to question everything about who I was and how I showed up in my interpersonal relationships. Jewel was a remarkable woman and being loved by her, and then losing that love, blew me wide open. It made me probe where I went wrong, forced me to see my faults and failings, as well as gifting me to see where I shone. That breakup gifted me this year, gifted me the chance to almost remake myself, in a sense. Those emotions were too difficult for me to handle and so I pursued things so far outside of my comfort zone in order not to feel them, at least not feel them in the immediacy of the breakup. When my heartache started to subside, I learned to sit with all the difficult bits, admit to myself that I didn’t think that highly of who I was, and make some real, concerted effort to rectify that truth.
In the aftermath of my beautiful, heartbroken year, I have found myself. I have come home to who I am. The difference between the Nikki from before and the Nikki now writing these words is that I–down to my bones–like who I am (yes, yes, I love myself but I am now someone I’d want to be friends with). Gone is the clawing need to be loved by another human. Gone is the desire to manage who I am and how I show up. Gone is the belief that I was the only one to blame for the failings of that relationship. I’ve been through some difficult times in my life and, emotionally speaking, this breakup was one of the hardest. Truth be told, I don’t ever want to go through something like this again but I am immensely grateful for having come through it. I am content and I am living. What more could I ask for?