You’re thinking, maybe it would be easier to let it sliplet it gosay ”I give up” one last time and give him a sad smile.You’re thinkingit shouldn’t be this hard,shouldn’t be this dark,thinkinglove could flow easily with no holding backand you’ve seen others find their match and build something greattogether,of each other,like two halves fitting perfectly and now they achieve great thingsone by one, always together, and it seems grand.But you love him. Love him like a black stone in your chest you couldn’t live without because it fits in there. Makes you who you are and the thought of him gone—no more—makes your chest tighten up and maybe this is your fairytale. Maybe this is your castle.You could get it all on a shiny piece of glass with wooden stools and a neverending blooming gardenbut that’s not yours. This is yours. The cracks and the faults, the ugly words in the winterwalking home alone and angrybut falling asleep thinking you love him.This is your fairy tale. The quiet in the hallway, wishing for him to turn around, tell you to stay, tell you to please don’t go I need youlike you need meand maybe it’s not a Jane Austen novel but this is your novel and your castleand you can run from it your whole life but this is herein front of you.Maybe nurture it?Sweet girl, maybe close the world off and look at him for an houror two.This is your fairy. It ain’t perfect and it ain’t honey sweet with roses on the bed.It’s real and raw and ugly at times. But this is your love. Don’t throw it away searching for someone else’s love. Don’t be greedy. Instead, shelter it. Protect it. Capture every second of easy, pull through every storm of hardship. And when you can, look at him, lying next to you, trusting you not to harm him. Trusting you not to go. Be someone’s someone for someone.Be that someone for him.That’s your fairy tale. This is your castle.Now move in. Build a home. Build a house. Build a safety around things you love. It’s yours if you make it so.Welcome home, sweet girl, it will be all be fine.
deathAloneness has been my constant companion in life. I lost early the people that I loved: first when my young and unmarried biological mother had to leave me because of outer circumstances. I was adopted by a very loving couple, who could not concieve a child. I have always felt naturally loved by them, and I have never really felt that I was adopted. Instead, I have always felt that I did a little detour to be able to be adopted by my real parents. Then my mother died when I was 15 years old after a long sickness. On her funeral I took the decision to never depend on anybody again. Her death created such a deep pain in me that it was also the death of relationships for me. Then my father died when I was 21 years old – and I was completely alone in the world. This created a basic feeling of being alone and unloved in me, it created early a feeling of independence and self-suffiency in me. It also created a basic feeling of not trusting that I am alright as I am, and of not trusting that life takes care of me. This created such a pain in me that I simply repressed the pain for many years in order to survive. These early meetings with death also created a thirst in me to discover a quality, an inner awareness, that death could not take away. Now I can see that these early painful experiences are a blessing in disguise. It liberated me from relationships. I relate with people, but there is always an aloneness within me. I realize that a seeker of truth needs to accept that he is totally alone. It is not possible to lean on other people like crutches. When we totally accept our aloneness, it becomes a source of love, joy, truth, silence, meditation and wholeness. I shared these experiences with a beloved friend and her thoughtful comment was: “I have my own aloneness.” Aloneness is to be at home in ourselves, to be in contact with our inner source of love, while loneliness is to hanker for other people, to hanker for a source of love outside of ourselves. Aloneness is to come home.