A love all for me.

I'm a lucky man to count on both hands the ones I've loved ~ some folks just have one, others they have none

I'm not a man, but I am lucky to have loved so truly and so deeply in my life. As I pack up for yet another move, I'm finally going through some of the detrius of my 30 years and seeing evidence of so, so much love. Letters from this one, scarves from that one, earrings from all of them. As I begin to confuse which of my loves adored the freckles on my shoulder, I realize how much I love having this open heart.

Last night's yoga practice brought an epiphany -as yoga often does. Our teacher gives us this beautiful gift of song at the end of each session, and last night was "Blackbird," from the Beatles....but she sings it slowly, mournfully. Somehow, the line "take these broken wings and make them fly" made it hit:

For many years now - 10? 15? 30? - I've been pushing my inner soul, my love, my heart, on a death march toward forced happiness. Your dad died? Onward, find a boy. That one really loves your best friend? Onward, find another one. Try and try and try to make it fit the mold of "supposed to be." Doesn't work out? Onward, find another one. He really wants your roommate? Onward, figure out this love for a woman. She's taken? Definitely onward, as in onward across the country. Find someone totally inappropriate and unavailable. Big surprise, that doesn't work out. Marry the man who brings some small peace to the soul. Wrong gender, eh? Maybe ya shoulda listened to the heart sooner. Anyway, onward. ONWARD! Oh, she ain't quite right either.

And here I find myself at nearly 30, exhausted far beyond years or reason.

There were moments of breathing in there, in that long march - moments that forced themselves upon me. But they were few and far between, and certainly not by choice. And in all of those people I desperately attached myself to, not one was exactly right. The man I married came pretty close, if only he'd been a different gender.

So, with my yoga teacher's sung advice to "take these broken wings and make them fly," I got an image of my inner self - not quite a little girl, not quite an adult woman - with broken limbs and bruised skin, and I just keep beating her onward. A bruise appears and all she wants is to rest, and I force her to keep going, find the next person. A bone snaps under the pressure, and maybe I let her sit down for a minute, but then we keep going, looking for this elusive happiness I have been taught to believe comes from couplehood, from the other half of me.

And she keeps trying to tell me....Kristen, we can run as far and as fast as we want, but happiness is not over that next hill, around the next bend. Even if it were, could we see it, feel it, if we're so battered and bruised by the time we get there?

So. It seems to be time to rest, now. Let that inner me pause, and breathe, and sit, and heal. It doesn't mean aloneness, or not-being-coupled, forever. But I'm so exhausted I don't even know how to pour into another person anymore.

So I'll heal.