We Are For Now All Here

Look at all this life arriving and leaving us all over the place: here we are, losing our youth. We are losing time to the things we have paced circles around. Or maybe time isn’t lost but it is given over, and in exchange, we are given this lesson, this memory; we are given tokens of varying size that may or may not feel like it was worth the deal.

One of us lost their mother, their husband. She lost the baby at five weeks. Grief is its own ending and beginning and exists in its own eternity every single day.

We are letting go and getting over the end of these relationships we’ve tried so hard to keep in our hands. We sometimes realize we need to put something down, but the question is, where exactly are we supposed to put it? One of us, in response to their breakup, has taken up roller skating, which I think is a way of saying that when we can’t make sense of something, the best antidote is to find something beautifully absurd and let it carry us.

We are leaving some shit triumphantly behind; we are leaving that job that sucks out the marrow from our bones, the place that doesn’t know us, the toxic relationship we have been in for too long. We have proclaimed, once and for all, we are done dating unavailable men. We are done giving the best of ourselves over to our work. We are done talking to ourselves in a way that makes our hearts cower. We are done with this language of shame. We are done holding back.

In all of these endings there are graciously with them also beginnings: we are starting to trust and heal and dream again. We are revisiting all the ways we can show ourselves kindness, all the things that spark the fire and remind us to draw close to the fire. We are leaning into this new job, this new city, this new stage of adulthood, parenthood, this (maybe? Could it be?) new love. We are beginning to see and honour our worth. We are leaning into a new way of thinking about it — the way our parents tried, the way we were doing the best we could at the time. We are allowing ourselves to admit that we don’t know almost anything, and with that, allowing ourselves a whole lot of grace.

We are trying new things, like dating at 45 and practicing boundaries and cutting out dairy and applying for jobs that scare us and applying liquid mascara and trauma therapy and rock climbing. We are starting a whole new world, creating it bit by bit. We are deciding what we want to take with us.

We are learning what it means to fall in love with ourselves, and this life, tiny and precious and full of ache. We are figuring out how to go about all this living, with all its loss and missteps and confusion and loneliness and paradox: we know and don’t know, we have and don’t have.

We are for now all here, alive, in the place of endings and beginnings, shoulder to shoulder, or maybe for the brave enough, hand in hand.