This Is Where I'm At

Three minutes to six in the morning. I woke up around four-thirty this morning, staying in bed until the first slivers of the silver pre-dawn light faded in. The Bedtime Betty gummy I take most nights only last me about six hours, but it’s a solid sleep. The gummy keeps the intermittent, chaotic sleep that has been my nightly pattern for the past year at bay. Coffee on my desk, Zoë Keating on in the background, open packing boxes lining my walls. This is a study of a woman in transition.

Two months ago, the person I had planned to spend my life with and I split. The details of the relationship and cause of our going separate ways—at this moment—are still too close, still too recent, to have any kind of insight into. These two months have been emotional ones, losing my family, losing my favorite person, losing friends and community and rituals and familiarity. For a month, I was without home, spending time with my sister and folks. I was unmoored. Adrift.

These past three weeks, after moving into a new apartment, life has started to settle. The apartment doesn’t exactly feel like home; my idea of home is the people that fill it, not a place to collect my belongings. Without someone to come home to, my apartment feels vacant, an empty vessel. A dozen boxes remain scattered throughout the rooms, supply chain delays on ordered furniture creating this interim state of being, not fully unpacked, not fully moved in. It adds to the general unease.

My mantra these days is Patience and kindness. Kindness and patience. I repeat this to myself when I feel the weight of where I’m at pulling at me. I often want to push through things quickly, arrive at some end state that I’ve built up in my head. As my therapist tells me, though, “You can’t rush this, Nikki. If you don’t allow the emotions now, if you don’t process them, healing will take longer.”

And so I ride the waves. The few days after we broke up, they were tsunamis; sobbing crys stuck in my throat, not able to catch my breath, choking on the anger and sadness and fear. Sleep was rare then, maybe two hours at a time, total of three? The crying has lessened now and sleep lengthened, which is a welcome move in a more stable direction. I attribute it to sitting with things, allowing myself to remember, to pull apart the nostalgia of the relationship from the reality of it. The nostalgia is what could have been, a projection of what I wanted and hoped, and a rosier remembrance of what was. Nostalgia is very often deceitful, a trickster disguised as happy memories. The reality of my relationship, now that some space has allowed a bit of perspective, isn’t that rosy. The opaque haze I’ve been engulfed in is evaporating; clarity is coming into focus.

I’m now forty-four, newly single. It is not what I wanted but life is hard and does not care what we desire for. This is where I’m at, learning who I am alone, making new friends, trying new things, and hopefully in the future, finding a partner—in the truest sense of the word—to share my life with. My focus is the here and now. To be kind and patient with myself. To learn to love myself again, to take the good from what was and fold it into what is. To stay in this space, to feel it all, and not rush through the experience of losing my best friend and remapping where my life is headed. It’s hard work but nothing good ever came from something easy.