I am watching a documentary on the life of Amy
Winehouse and she is speaking about writing “Back to Black” – which is a
crushing song really - and she talks about writing the song, saying, "You
have to remember how you felt, you have to remember what the weather was like,
you have to remember what his neck smelled like.” I freeze. My stomach
clinches. My eyebrows gather and my throat constricts. An actual pain radiates
through my chest and I spend the next five minutes mourning the loss of some
unidentifiable part of me. It’s like a limb is missing or an organ that I took
for granted while it did its job, and now there is space left by its absence
and though I don’t miss the function it provided as much because I can
compensate in some way…the space it left turns dark and fills with smoke
and every now and then that smoke floats through my body, washing over me and
making every inch of me ache…and then it retreats to the confines of it’s
original form…and it waits.
My life lately has been a collection of moments rather
than an actual story. Each moment seems completely it’s own. I seem to be a
different person in each and I can’t find the consistent “me.” I can’t weave my
way through the moments untouched and unaffected. One minute I am my silly
self, laughing at work with a colleague; the next I am staring at myself in the
bathroom mirror, not seeing anything at all, replaying a moment that some word
or smell or noise brought back to me. I am not fully Me in either moment. I am
not fully Me in any moment, but I am closer…I get closer to Me with each passing
hour. Right now I am only Me in the quiet moments between breaths. I watch the
other moments and all the people who I know are my friends and loved ones as
though they are in a movie. I might reach out and touch them, I might smile
with them or laugh with them…but Me is deep inside sitting on the sideline
watching it all and trying to step in but not yet able to really be there.
Drama, right? It’s a little too heavy when I
write this way. It’s all completely real – but my suffering is so small in this
world. I am a girl, a woman I guess though I have never really seen it that
way, who broke her heart. Nothing more and it’s a pretty common ailment. I
didn’t have my heart broken…I broke it myself the way you break an arm or leg.
No one walked up and broke your leg, a careless moment, an unexpected twist…you
weren’t guarded and you were vulnerable and the bone couldn’t take the pressure
all on it’s own. No one broke my heart. I broke it myself.
But I keep breathing and that simple little act
is brave in some small way. First I was just exhaling and allowing my inhales
to come out of some involuntary muscle contraction occurring somewhere inside
my body. Over time, I have taken back the inhale too. The tiny muscles in my
eyelids joined in and took control over the opening and closing and reopening
of my eyes and my brain started to note inputs again, replacing the passive
glaze that had effectively deceived the people around me into thinking I was
there while I wasn’t. I have been taking back the responsibility to live, bit
by bit.
So, this moment is not about the person I should
have been or the person I will be – it’s about where I am today. It’s about the
wild swing of each moment and the strength of the emotions behind each. We are
all so lucky to be given the chance to feel so strongly. We each get to laugh
one moment, cry the next and feel both of those so fully. Who we are comes from
finding our way between moments and knowing that we can always, at our most
challenging moment, rely on our bodies to just take over – making the inhale
and exhale happen, opening and closing the eyes while we take a mini-vacation
and feel nothing.
I think a lot about peace. Peace does not mean
you feel you have always been your best self or have always done the right
thing. Peace is accepting that those things are in the past and all you can
really do is be IN THIS VERY MOMENT. It’s not contentment…because contentment
implies you are happy with where you are. Peace simply means you accept the
temperature of the room, the posture you are sitting in, the amount of light
hitting your eyes, the sounds your ears are registering, the weight of gravity
pulling the atmosphere into your every inch…you aren’t happy about it all, you
aren’t bothered by any of it, you just ARE. I practice tiny moments of
peacefulness and am grateful to feel nothing at all.
