It Comes In Cycles

Or it has for the past year, when whatever rom-com ending I'd brought out and dusted off for my last serious relationship got rewritten into something more art house bleak.

The start of the cycle is a wail: I'm going to be alone forever.

Though I have only rare moments of being lonely, in those moments the idea of being sans partner for the rest of my life is chest-tighteningly horrible. I wonder what's wrong with me, what I've done to deserve it, how I got too fucked up to maintain a healthy relationship with someone nice. I wallow in that deep deep pool of self-loathing even though I know full well how full of love my life is.

Thankfully, those moments are only briefly intense. I may tread water for a few weeks after, the weedy hopeless thoughts brushing against my ankles.

Then I pull out. I get fine with my singledom, happy about it, even. But so far, it's been happy in a fuck you kind of way. Like my happy wants to wreak vengeance on a society that tells me I am less than without a lover. I am out to prove how little I need someone.

When I'm that kind of happy, I'm usually still on the look out for a partner, or a lover who might become a partner. Being on the look out, of course, means looking fine, being on, having your sights set. It can be a lot of fun.

It takes a lot of energy, the bouncy energy that whips around your body and brain.

It gets tiring.

Last week, I reached the final phase of the cycle. I have given up trying to find someone. I let the fuck-you happy whirl away.

What is left is calm. Middle-of-the-lake on a windless night calm. It feels mostly good. It feels like I have more energy for the stuff I'm interested in. It feels like holding a yoga posture in which I've gotten solid.

This calmness does come with a sense of grief, the nostalgic loss of a future I had written. Not in stone. But like I was gripping one of those finger games with one spot empty, and you have to click the tiles to make the picture. Only the ink was half rubbed off the plastic, two intertwined hands the the only part visible, and I'm guessing at the rest of the tableau.

It is hard to give up wanting something. The absence leaves you hollow.

Though only for a bit, or in waves. In between the crests, you fill your life up with the stuff you want to do. You build the life you want to live. You figure that someday, maybe, someone might share it with you. If they're lucky. Or they won't, and that will be fine too.

Because it is a cycle, the sentence at the end is the same as the sentence to start, just spoken in a wry half-smiled murmur.