Good lord, it is my birthday eve.
I am turning 45.
Half of 90.
Good lord.
Here is what I can say. I'm not sure any of it is particularly wise.
For one thing, ending a relationship in your forties is very different from ending a relationship in your twenties or thirties. There are far fewer single people around when you're done, for one thing. For another, those who are single are usually carrying around some kind of uncomfortable baggage--yourself included. Bumping around, bumping into each other, reminding each other of things you keep trying to forget.
You miss people more at this age, too, I find. I think it's that by now you've learned more about how to love, so there's somehow more to miss. My former lover had this habit--not even a habit really, just a way--of hanging around the island in my kitchen. Just sort of alternating between pacing back and forth and standing still. There was nothing so notable about it, really; it was just him existing. Yet it was lovely, and the memory can move me to tears no matter where I am. I still ache from it. He held my hand one night, in a hospital, in a foreign land. But I've already told that story.
As I head into 45, I have learned that your friends are the people who simply show up. They scramble to schedule a dinner date when your heart is aching. They show up at your apartment for two hours on a Thursday night because it's the only time you can find and for once you need to cry in the presence of another human being, even though it's inconvenient. They walk in the park with you, listen to your stories and sit beside you with them.
Actually, I think that's it: If it's true that sometimes grief walks in your front door, plops down on your sofa in front of your TV and makes itself at home, your friends are the ones who sit down with you, next to it. They pick up the side pillow and set it on their laps to make a little extra room. These are your friends.
I've learned that it seems to get harder and harder to make a graceful exit from one another's lives as we get older. As a friend commented the other day, what's with the ungraceful exits? Maybe it's a function of knowing that we have less time. Maybe there's a valid argument: Why stumble around minefields of sadness when you can scream 'never contact me again!' and be finished with it? Maybe when there's less time, there can be less time spent on things like kindness and grace.
I wish there were more. I wish there were more time spent on kindness and grace. I wish particularly that the men I seem to hand my heart to spent more time, and had more facility with, kindness and grace.
Finally, and only because I'm getting tired and it's time to go to sleep and make it my birthday, I've reversed my opinion on this: For a long time I believed that time doesn't really change us fundamentally. It changes the details, sometimes all of them, but I believed that the core of who you are now is the core of who your were when you were 14 or 17 or 27.
I no longer believe this.
I think I lost faith in it. Mostly because a boy I knew at those ages turned out to be a man I would not have expected, in the worst possible way. That boy with the huge heart is nowhere to be found; he is someone I used to know. I believe that something happened, life handed him something, or an entire package of somethings, that altered his fundamentals.
My childhood heart could not have been so wrong.
This saddens me, on this birthday eve. The exit from my life of my husband and my marriage--the sweetness of that safe life, as unsafe as it was--saddens me. That I still long for a lover who walked an invisible plank along my kitchen island while my heart flooded with tenderness, over and over, and that this plays itself out repeatedly in a movie in my mind, saddens me.
I have hope, too.
Tonight I hope that I am walking gracefully out of my 44th year of life on this strange and beautiful planet. Last night I danced around my living room--my new favorite dance tune, some choreography I learned in a new dance class. My heart raced and sang. This is still possible on an everyday basis.
There is much to hope for.
Happy my birthday.
