Archer is my dog.
The way he looks at me gifts me a sense of completeness I rarely feel from humans. While he isn’t able to speak to me with words, I know his eyes are curious about all of me all of the time, and his presence is attempting to see me and be with me, especially when I’m upset. I can watch his eyebrows search my face and his yawns release the tense energy he is moving from me.
“What are you feeling, mama? How can I help? Does this paw on your heart help? I bet it helps. There, there, mama. You’re okay. I helped.”
Albeit I wish he could talk just so I knew I wasn’t making any of this up.
I’m moving through an intense uprising of deep-seeded loneliness and incompleteness. I’m not sure where it comes from, but it’s a very old wound. It feels like it’s been with me since I was 5 or 6. Possibly before then, albeit not as consciously. I know it isn’t uncommon to search for things outside of our self, but this feels a little different than just plugging a whole. It feels like I’m searching for my twin, something that was with me at birth, then torn away and lost to me. Like if I search the souls of others with enough interest, I’ll see the missing piece of myself inside of them and we’ll be reunited.
This narration has been a compass for so long. The hope that this mirrored existential thing exists out there and has yet to be found has driven my decisions for who I come into relationship with, who I discard, who I am scared of, and everything in between. I believe, somewhere far below the surface of my being, that when I find them, I’ll know it, but maybe they don’t know it? So this whole realization may take awhile. I’m living in a strange distortion of a future that doesn’t exist, strung about by the sheer thread of hope. It makes me linger with others, stay loyalty to others, but also fuels incredible resentment for their inability to meet this expectation I have that they will innately be curious about my inner universe and want to explore it at the exact same level of interest I will have about their inner world and wanting to discover it.
I literally don’t know where this comes from. Why would I create such a narrow field of success for myself? One person, in this world of billions, will hit me like lightning and vice versa and we will be bonded in one specific language of love? It’s insane to write it out, but my mind is so hell bent on this reality that it is still desperately searching, still totally devastated that we haven’t found it.
I receive dozens of other forms of love. My husband will sit with me for hours, patiently quiet and steady, while I cry. It feels good to me and I appreciate it, but it isn’t “the way.” There’s still something missing. I can receive it, but it doesn’t fulfill me. And yet, my soul knows, I can’t be fulfilled by anything outside of my self, but my humanness keeps on seeking. Dismissing everything that is “less than” just enough to stoke the flame of finding this missing piece.
I honestly don’t know where this comes from or why I feel it. I’m not even sure I comprehend how a small child can carry this weight and understand it enough to have knowledge of it as a memory. Is this ancestral trauma? Am I carrying something that isn’t mine? Was I birthed into a lineage of loneliness and so I have it by the nature of my DNA?
Maybe.
Does it even matter?
Isn’t it more important that I just accept it and learn to sit with it and allow it to exist and befriend it and give this vast empty hole the love it needs to heal itself?
Maybe?
Why can’t I be the one who is curious about others and let that be unconditional rather than expecting someone to return the favor?
I don’t know.
I don’t want to be a victim of some arbitrary twin flame potentially waiting to meet me out in the aether. I want to remain open to that beautiful possibility, but I also want to embrace the love I receive now, in the present moments. The food that is prepared with love and made with the intent to nourish me. The patience that stands still amidst my chaos for as long as it takes for my body to settle. The soft embraces that tell me with physicality, “You are not alone, I am right here.”
I have to admit, all of those lack something. I wish I knew why or better yet, I wish I could just not give a fuck about the why and receive what is with gratitude. But I’m guessing it isn’t about being one or the other. Something that continually shows up for me is contradiction and duality and I suppose this is just another form of the lesson reminding me I must embrace both. I’m not playing a game of this or that. I’m playing the game of both and.
And I fucking hate it sometimes.
(But also, it’s pretty fucking cool… and there it is again. Shall we laugh?)
