Month: September 2022

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” I cut him off mid-sentence.
This conversation escalated quickly from the Nice-to-Meet-You’s and handshakes we just exchanged minutes before.
“She knows,” Mom chimed in as defense as she waved casually in his direction.
“I’m sorry, I just couldn’t not say anything,” he explained.
I’d said the exact same thing to so many of my friends over the years, how could I be upset with him?
“No, I feel you.” I insisted with three seconds of eye contact before he smiled back.

I forget sometimes that family doesn’t automatically equate to judgmental.
Sometimes folks really do just care for you.

“Thank you so much for coming,” Dad called to me from the kitchen as I had been trying to slip out the side door. His eyes were so genuine. He’d done this every time, and each time I had to force myself to hold his warm eyes.
Force myself to accept the reassurance, accept the affection, accept the connection, accept the generosity.
I’ve been working so hard on not being cold and distant while I’m internally melting away like a candle forgotten in the kitchen.

It’s okay to want to feel loved.
Queen of rejecting nourishment my soul needs, simply because I’d gotten this far without it.

“They’re a hoot,” he told me moments later at home from across my patio table.
I beamed proudly, “I’m just happy they were looking to adopt a 31-year-old daughter.”

I’ve been working so diligently to break the habits I formed while enduring the treatment I did not deserve. Working to accept the love I’m given, instead of rejecting it out of discomfort. Working to believe people when they show me who they are. Working to believe people when they show me how much they care. Working to accept that not everyone has a hidden agenda. Not every interaction is a test.

“If they didn’t want to, they wouldn’t.” Stephanie told me last month.
She was right. They wouldn’t. But they want to, so they do.

I’m not angry at you for the things you didn’t do for the little girl that relied on you the most. I’m not angry at you for missing the mark on the things other people’s parents effortlessly picked up. I’m not angry at you for allowing me to fend on my own much sooner than I should have had to. I’m not angry at you at all.

I am grateful that you did not have an influence in raising the person I am today,
because that girl would not have been a phoenix.

“This house was so beautiful,” I said out loud from my spot in the corner of the living room. I was sitting on the floor, with the dog in my lap. My pants were covered in dust and dog fur. The furniture had all been removed from the house some odd days prior, and the holes in the walls from where the shelves and the photos used to hang were the only decorations available for viewing. The base boards and the hardwood were scuffed, and the windows were filthy, and all I could think about was how many Saturday mornings I’d woken up, and spent my entire day cleaning this house from top to bottom. For some reason the tiles in the bathrooms were the hardest to get the cat fur off of. A spotless house was the only thing I had control over during that time in my life and I clung to it like a safety vest in the ocean.
“I remember you not really loving it when we moved in,” He gave me a slight wince from across the living room.
“I didn’t,” I replied immediately. “I hated everything, then.”

I can’t remember exactly what he said next, but I remember it feeling like accountability.

I woke up the next morning, and I could immediately tell that he was awake on the other side of me. “Can you spoon me?” I asked, as I threw a hand behind me, patting around for his.
“What did you used to tell me all the time?” He asked rhetorically as he threw an arm and a leg over the top of me, “Give me the booty.”

We used to write and leave love notes all over the house for each other.
And even when we were struggling- we’d go days without speaking to each other, only writing to each other in a notebook, and leaving it out for the other.
Shit at communicating but, still trying.

I remember waking up one morning, in our first apartment together, to a piece of scrap paper on the coffee table scribbled with, “you are exactly what I’ve never had.”
I remember feeling so fucking proud to be his girlfriend. Below it I wrote back, “you are exactly what I’ve always wanted. ♥” and it lived on the side of our fridge until we moved out.

I remember writing on a piece of painters tape in our new house, that I wanted to be our dog in my next life- so I could do this life with him all over again, and I stuck it inside the hall closet.
He didn’t see it for awhile after I’d put it there.
“Cheesy!” He said one day with a smile, as he walked into the art room to kiss me.

I thought I’d torn them all off the walls the day I’d moved out, but here was one of them 3-years later, taped to the back of the bathroom door. Typed out on the typewriter he had bought me for my birthday one year. Or maybe it was one of our anniversaries. I thought for sure the house would have been wiped clean of Micaela by now.

“You know I put that up there, right?” I asked him in the backyard just a moment later, wiping my wet hands on my pants.

He nodded casually, “I know.”