Having spent the best part of a decade attached at both hips to either my wife, or my queen dog, Martini, I find myself reluctantly leaving both of them in Louisiana. I say reluctantly, but really I just don’t actually have words capable of describing what it actually feels like to leave a decade long partnership and a 16 year old chihuahua across the country from me. Because there’s a slew of emotions. A right mud trough running across sloping land, promising me, there will be fertile soil to farm, come the end of all of this, but right now, my boots are just stuck and mucky.
I don’t know about you, but I certainly know about myself, and knowing me, this is gonna hurt. We’ve spent the better part of the last year setting both of our heart-selves up to succeed at being separate from one another, but now that the clock is ticking time down, I just see the truth. Three days from now, I leave them both here and travel back up to Oregon, where my business lives, and where my little boy dog, Dirt, is waiting patiently to remind me how much he loves his Momma.
It’s really not all bad though. Both she and I have already tried everything on (and off) the books to make things be actually GOOD. And we couldn’t. We couldn’t make our connection continue forward in a way that felt healthy to either of us. So, we talked our ways towards this situation right here, called it love, packed up her stuff, put it first in a van, then a Uhaul, and I drove us 8 days away from home.
I have been crying on and off for the last two weeks since we got here, and reading a book called “Letting Go”. It’s helping. But not in enough of a way that I am released, free, or unburdened by the actual sensation and the grief that comes from letting go of someone with actual love and care.
The two of us have laughed our way across the country three full times now. We have shown up for each other, no matter the cost, for an entire big dog’s life span. We have loved each other very well. Still, relationships end. No matter how many google searches I make for “how not to break up” or “best ways to establish communication that REALLY works with your partner.” Everything ends. Everything changes. I feel the murky sensations of deep emotions rising in my gullet tonight.
Gratitude keeps me grounded, reminds me even, that I have chosen to be one of the lucky ones. I am getting divorced, am divorced, have been divorced and working towards actual separation for the last six months, and I still get to keep my best friend.
I have been here before. I have left another beautiful woman behind, gotten on an airplane and left for an entirely different state, but this time… I am returning home, returning to my tattoo and art business, instead of leaving.
This seemingly small differentiation is the significant difference a decade can make. For I have always been the one leaving. The woman abandoning my post for sights unseen, for new adventures to be had, for new lives to try on and try living within new confines I build. But, not this time. This time I am practicing staying. Wading all the way to the end, showing up for feeling after feeling and letting them go their own way. Allowing myself to feel utterly stuck, scared, terrified, miserable… with a side order of Hope.
Again, I am lucky. I get to keep the people I love. I bend over backwards oftentimes to make it so, and also, there’s something powerful to be said of an artist that follows through. With a human who stubbornly sees things, relationships, learning experiences, paintings, murals, all the way to their fated end, it makes that human trust themselves. It allows me to trust myself. It doesn’t make the ending easier exactly, it just makes it feel more honorable to me.
And, for the first time in my entire adult life, I really only need to feel honorable to me. So, back home I go, to see the next stages of my soul grow and blossom, and I am really hoping I fall deeply in love with who it is I am becoming.
