Healing doesn’t always happen in big moments. Sometimes it happens in doses. Often it is incremental.
Like one day you will find yourself before a man, giving long answers without hesitation. Before you even know it, you’re telling a long, detailed story and then it hits you. You realize you’ve never done it before- told a story to completion without hesitating, fragmenting, or recoiling.
And the man before you doesn’t take his eyes off you or interrupt. Instead, he gazes up at you eagerly and asks a question, and then another, and then another one.
And you think of all the times before, you spoke in pauses or cut stories short. The way you listened to an old lover drone on, but kept yourself from ‘rambling’. Eager to keep his secrets, but fearful of telling him yours. Never trusting his interest.
**
Or sometimes it happens when you’re with friends at the beach. You’re kicking back cans, laughing, and finding different ways to kill time with food and mixed drinks. On the way to the next restaurant, your friend takes you side saddle on the back of his beat up bike and gives you a 1.5 mile lift. He’s pumping hard and you’re f**king terrified, but you’re also laughing. You realize you haven’t heard yourself full belly laugh like this in a while.
You think back to the heartbroken woman a year before. She’s sitting by a big rock by the ocean- weeping and wondering. And you know leaving him was the right decision. It took you here.
**
But sometimes it does happen in big moments. You have a fight with your man, and you think this is it- this is where it all goes to shit. This is where he shuts down. You brace yourself for a pain you’re all too familiar with.
And then he texts you in less than an hour. He tells you he loves you, that he was being an idiot and he’ll see you in the morning.
In the morning, he drives you around and helps you run errands. When you finally get a moment to sit, he pulls you in close, and with tears in his eyes he says “I’m sorry about last night. I couldn’t bear the thought of letting you leave like this.”
Your defenses drop and you disarm immediately. You think of all the times before getting an “I’m sorry” was like pulling teeth or hitting a wall. All the times you felt like you were “too much” for men much smaller than him.
And you realize maybe this is healing. It’s not always in milestones or long term relationships. Sometimes it’s just with a guy you met at a bar and spent all night talking with. The one who held your face with his hands and said “You’re beautiful because you’re real.” Sometimes, it comes when you’re kicking back cans with friends at the beach. When you realize you’d rather be nowhere but here. And sometimes, if you’re really lucky- it’s with someone you love, when you least expected to love again.
Maybe that’s all healing really is. Not time or distance. Just presence. A person or people standing before you, seeing you as you are- not afraid of coming any closer. Leaning in.
La Absurda 