The problem was, my heart got so bruised, so broken I had to put my vulnerability on lockdown. Even in the worst of the pain and confusion, I knew I didn't want to keep it that way. And I missed the companionship, so I guarded myself and sought relationships I didn't need to actually invest in. Relationships that were guaranteed dead-ends.
Much like those serendipitous conversations that strike up with your seat neighbor on an airplane. A brief, beautiful bit of humanity in an interaction that feels so simplified – a kind of ordinary magic. And yet, when the plane lands, you don't exchange information, you might not even know each other's name. As if the agreed-upon course of the context, you exit the plane, walk down the jetway and each join the swirling sea of strangers. No matter how profound it may have felt in the moment, you may never think of the person or the conversation again, even though you carry it with you.
This era turned out to be exposure therapy, teaching me that not every ending is earth-shattering. But it also brought to the surface a sense of being taken for granted and devalued. And in the last of the string of such relationships, I began to snap out of it. I could see through the facade I'd built for myself, that I'd been choosing supposedly-safe relationships when in reality I ended up getting hurt because they didn't really care about me. And I didn't want to tolerate being disposable anymore – that was the very thing that shook my core in the first place!
When I began to realize the relationship I was in was one where I was merely a stand-in, that's when someone strikingly different crossed my path. Someone rare. And although I try not to let myself entertain the thought, I think it ruined me. It brought me back to what it feels like to not just be a buoy someone clings to for a while. The magic of the airplane seatmate who you were meant to know not just encounter. I was caught by surprise how clear it was; a grounded feeling that I was wary to trust.
But life had its way as it does... So, I find myself back at a similar yet different place, wondering "Now what do I do?" Only this time I'm not heartbroken, I'm...struck. Struck by the feeling of that reverberating in me, and doubtful that it's something you can simply hunt for a replica of and find. That's not how it works. Maybe for some of us life will only entail brief airplane connections. Having magic you get to hold onto might be the myth of the cinematic happy-ending, granted to some by dumb luck. I'm sort of left waiting to feel differently; to be open to the possibility that special could be more than something I had for a few moments in my life. More than a figment of the imagination to hopelessly long will realize. That I'll even know what it is, should I see it.