During the beginning of this Social Distancing season, I hit the ground running. I had just gotten back from facilitating a healing retreat in Utah. The “I miss you, I wanna quarantine witchu” texts from a lover grounded my reality of how soon quarantine was coming to Los Angeles. The Stay At Home order was announced that night. I went grocery shopping the next day, stocked up on all of the things I needed, and surrendered to the circumstances of this global situation. Most of my time was spent in bed. I tend to heal from expending energy in large groups by prioritizing time for myself to do nothing but masturbate, binge watch anime, eat, and day nap. I did all of these things, while spending a month trying to find a new pattern of communication with my lover through our phones (a method we usually don’t use to communicate). So, it was a shock to me during our first conversation since staying at home that they thought it would be better for us to change our romantic relationship to a platonic one.
I’m a methodical person. My brain is most comfortable when I can trace the threads that connect my thoughts, emotions, and actions to one another. This goes for understanding others as well. So when they couldn’t give me a reason why they wanted to end our romantic relationship, I began to spiral as my brain was trying to make sense out of something that didn’t. I had to take a bath and process my emotions in water. There was this numbness that came on during the initial phone call that helped minimize the amount of pain I would express on Facetime. I have never cried in front of them. In the water, I felt myself coming back to me. The protective numb melted away and revealed this angry being that kept shaking their head and laughing as if I would wake up from a dream, but no. The reality was, I was experiencing my first break up ever from my first relationship in the middle of a global pandemic.
What lay beneath was coming to the surface all at once. A dramatic difference between how me and this lover communicate was noticed in this closing of a chapter. I feel like I am mourning alone. Replaying in my head the last times I kissed this person, held them, were fed by them, massaged them, not knowing they would even be the last. I feel the blocks or challenges we have romantically would only carry into a platonic relationship and the lack of acknowledgement of this by them doesn’t give me any sense of comfort stepping into a friendship with them. So I have no desire to. Because I am novice to the shiftings of a romantic relationship, especially one that I had been in for 1.5 years, I am battling a pattern of gaslighting myself and my emotions. Releasing images, stories, my own witnessing of what a break up could/should be through friends/family, and centering my own experience in relation to a very dramatic shift in my life feels aligned. What came to the surface was myself….tired, naked, and confused...asking to be taken care of. So I did.
I unfollowed them on social media. Seeing their face unplanned, when I was already having trouble sleeping (playing in my head the conversations and feelings I wanted to share with them the next time we talked), was something I wanted to avoid. I’ve been honing my thoughts around relationship, commitment, discomfort, anger, communication, and intention. I’ve been honing them doing what I do best. Magic. I acknowledge the facts. This happened the day before the start of Taurus season. The season I was born in. This happened days before a New Moon. The magnetic pull of ceremony being a place to process these emotions was undeniable. So ceremony is what I did. I set my altars with intentions of release and forgiveness. I wrote letters that I would never send while reading them to the planets. I am preparing for the venus retrograde period that happens right before my birthday and spans my mothers, and grandmothers birthday as well. There is a shift taking place in relationship to what I deserve, what I desire, and what I need to do in order to make these things physical. And everything in me keeps saying HEAL.
It takes a lot of energy for me to ask for help. I recognize I have a high tolerance for pain because I experienced heartbreak at a very young age. The pains of paternal abandonment and toxicity inform my relationship to my emotions. The pattern of seeing the femmes in my family navigating painful experiences with very little open communal support informed me as well. It’s a generational response to apologize for crying. For inconveniencing someone close to you with the weight of your emotions. It is a response I am learning to let go of. To acknowledge that I hurt, that my feelings are valid no matter if it was truly not this persons intention to hurt me, and to ask for help. So I have. I’ve been talking to others in my community who have experienced romantic shift, sharing conversation, receiving affirmation for how I’m responding, and asking them to make me break up playlists I can dance to. The mantra “there is no day, there is no day, there's only darkness, eternal sea of darkness” plays as I dance with the Sun thankful for the light and the shadow my being casts in its presence.
I think about what love is. If it were a physical entity created between two people, just because we are no longer making the intention to weave energy in that way doesn’t negate the existence of it. It is still alive. It is dancing outside of my general orbit while simultaneously closer to me than before. This love is a paradox. I am mourning the lack of closeness I feel. I did not anticipate my access to this love would expire so soon and in such a way. I see the echoes of it paint my day to day in pictures in my phone. Smells of peppermint black castor oil. Hair stopping up my drain. Meal recipes I was excited to share. This energy we created together brought me a lot of things, and has a mind of its own. I will never meet this energy again in the same way, for I have changed, this lover has changed, and the energy is living its own life dancing between the memories of them, me, and the places and people we shared this energy with. We created something infinite that cannot be bound even by my expectations of what I wanted it to be. This is both beautiful and scary for me.
This experience has made me question many things. Was it all a dream? How could it be real if it were to end like this? It takes my friends to confirm that all of my feelings are valid. That paradox exists. And that something can be so free and so limiting at the same time. The convergence of this polarity has shined light on what experiences I want. What love I deserve, what relationships I desire: romantic, sexual, non sexual, and what intentions I want to thread between this spectrum of intimacy, time, and my own understanding of myself. I want to love me, so deeply, that everyone around me knows what love I need, what love I desire, and what love I am capable of receiving. I want communication that is deeply rooted in truths that flow freely like a river. Communication that nurtures many growing things in its path that flourish and blossom attracting many a pollinator to lick many a nectar. I want equivalent energetic exchange that is balancing and abundant. I want emotional vulnerability that is so courageous it is not swayed in the face of fear and grounds its roots into the Earth at any wavering sign. I want a magnetic, long term dance that mirrors courting swans, birthing seahorses, and leopard slugs having sex. I want access to an unconditional love orgy that time, distance, myselves, and any beautifully aligned partners are invited to. It is my intention to show up fully to receive these blessed things, so I am taking this time to release anything I don’t need to open my arms and embrace a dream so clearly spoken from my exposed heart.