California State Lines
It comes barreling up from within me as forcefully as the Boeing 737 races for and touches the ground. Wheels smack the runway and I feel it shove my stomach, lungs, and ribcage aside as it claws its way into my throat. I try to hold it there, breathing in short bursts and swallowing hard beneath my mask, but that just sends it in search of an alternate escape route. My ears begin to ring and my eyes well. It won't be denied.
Briefly, I wonder if I’m going to throw up. But instead I slide my sunglasses on and let the tears spill. With that release, the intense wave of nausea passes. Now I’m just the unhinged woman crying while waiting to deplane instead of the who-knows-what woman puking in the aisle.
I expected an emotional assault of some kind coming back to California, though I’m a bit surprised at its immediacy and intensity. I’m also relieved just to get it over with. I’m not even in the same city as him for fuck’s sake, but my eyes drift north and I know he’s there, up the coast. I wonder if he feels me — a disturbance in the force. We always had an uncanny ability to communicate with each other across the astral plane.
“I love you.” They were the last words of his I ever saw, before I walled him off. But they had ceased to mean anything because I couldn’t fit them to any of his actions. What we had been doing wasn’t easy, but hard isn’t an excuse for carelessness, or cruelty. And in the end, everything about our connection felt cruel.
I had no illusions about what I was doing. I don’t expect to be the centre of anyone’s existence and I won’t put anyone at the centre of mine. But relationships of any kind don’t work without agreements. And so I’m angry. Angry at myself for not having the language and experience to have laid out my boundaries unequivocally at the outset. Angry at him for one more goddamned time treating me like I’m disposable. Angry at the all the wasted potential.
I’m also angry about being angry. And sad. How many more workshops and meditations and support sessions do I need to mend the part of myself that chases this kind of broken love? I almost laugh out loud through my tears as I think about the wisdom that says you’ve truly healed the wound that seeks unhealthy outcomes when the people and things that usually activate you cease to do so. Crying on a fucking plane sitting on the tarmac at LAX seems the furthest thing from being healed.
I resist the impulse to drop to my knees and beg the Universe for an answer. I’ve filled a notebook and a half in the last seven months trying to integrate every aspect of the deepest, darkest self that got me here, trying to rewire the neural pathways programmed for accepting less than I deserve. What else can I possibly do? Why on Earth have I burst into tears landing in the home state of a man who wanted my most vulnerable self and yet couldn’t commit to a simple communication schedule? It’s absurd. I’m absurd.
The only thing I can do is hold this line. It may have been inelegantly and insensitively drawn, but it was the only way I knew how to say: No matter who you are, and no matter what the nature of our relationship, you may not take me for granted, you may not prioritize your needs without considering mine, and you may not take my energy and love and care without a plan for how you will reciprocate.
So perhaps these tears aren’t just grief for losing him from my life. Perhaps they’re also a way to handle the frightening newness of this unknown territory — me standing in my own worth and, for once, not caving.
Perhaps this is not a breakdown I’m having here at an airport in southern California. Perhaps it is, at long last, an evolution.
