A year ago I was enjoying a quiet evening on a patio with one of my best friends, a couple cousins, and assorted company.
It was a local neighborhood place, the kind we’d been going to for years. We traded stories, and it had been a hell of a year already, losing my dad and all. But things were on the upswing again.
A few hours later my best friend and I were in the back of an ambulance. I looked like Jackie Kennedy as LBJ was inaugurated hastily on the Dallas tarmac – harried, bloody.
There was a flash of another car swerving by us, the brakes, the tire squeal, a moment where the world turned sideways.
I couldn’t get him out of the car and I remembered briefly that you weren’t supposed to attempt. He was responsive, but wedged between the seat and the steering wheel. I felt a sharp pain in the back of my head. My eye was swollen. Everything worked, and adrenaline forestalled the pain.
https://instagram.com/p/Bb6eBx4BnPd/
There I was, laid out on a gurney in the hallway, my cousin standing there as the doctor pumped 6 staples into my head.
I’m made of tough stuff, and I began the slow process of recovery.
A week later was our holiday party at work, something I’d been looking forward to. I’d never actually been a *part* of an office before and it seemed like such an adorable idea. It was an evening where the wine and laughter flowed freely. Sure my then-boyfriend yelled at me on the way home for having a little too much wine, but I was part of a group at least!
The next week I was fired. A few months and arguments later I was dumped.
I lost more jobs, relationships, and loved ones and I just kept losing.
Everything I’d put my trust in kept breaking down, and the worse it got, the harder I fought against the inevitable.
But I wasn’t gonna get rehired by the same place again and I wasn’t gonna woo back my boyfriend.
They weren’t meant to be.
I’d made a huge mistake – I’d let all these other things define my life.
I was defined by who I was with, my work, my possessions, my family. Everything was my relation to them, because I didn’t feel the confidence to be myself.
Since I’ve been writing and posting, I’ve been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support. I (begrudgingly) went to my 10 year reunion last night, and couldn’t believe all the love I received from people I’ve known almost all my life but haven’t seen in a decade.
I have the most amazing boyfriend I could ever ask for, who likes me for who I am, who drove six hours in the rain to join my family for a legendary Thanksgiving. It was the deepest act of sweetness.
It’s been a year of loss and of letting go, of being forced to say goodbye to the things that don’t work and being forced to learn life’s hardest lessons.
None of the things I’d surrounded myself with were meant to be. I can’t explain it though I’ve lived it. Whatever it is – an invisible hand of Providence, a karmic benefit, an algorithm silently executing reality – I don’t know.
But for once in my life, it seems like I’m living as myself, sitting on that same patio with loved ones, in an existence where everything’s meant to be.