Back to the Sun (Part 1)

It's been a year and a half since I went LA for the first time. To run away, flee the city that was now the birthplace of my sorely broken heart. Escape to the understanding eyes and quiet grace of my best friend Erica.

I went back on Wednesday, albeit under very different circumstances. It's been way too long since Erica and I took a walk together. My baby brother moved to Santa Monica in August, and I've been eager to get a glimpse of his new adult life (and, okay, maybe make sure with my own eyes that he's eating enough, doesn't have roommates who will turn him on to heroin, etc).

It's fitting, though, that on the eve of my trip, something would come across my desk to remind me of how much it hurt to go the first time. I haven't thought about him in ages - not since stumbling across confirmation that my suspicions about that girl at his office had been spot on - so it was unnerving to be reading an innocuous piece in the local paper and have the news hit me across the face. This past year and a half, I've tried really hard to forgive...to really forgive, both him and myself, for the way things ended, for all the things we did to hurt each other. To soften those hard feelings, to not harbor bitterness, to not let the actions of someone I used to know bleed into the current state of my heart. But then when something like the above forces me to think about him again...it stuns me how my immediate, undiluted reaction is that I just hate his whole life. I hate how much it still hurts, how that mix of pain and confusion and resentment can still come flooding to the surface so readily, still feel so new. Confusion, most of all...sometimes I miss the life we had in the beginning, but I know too much now to ever want it back. To want him back. But it's like the darker side of my shadow...it just wants him to hurt. To feel some kind of justice: You hurt me, and sometimes on purpose, and so I want to know that the world is paying you back for it. I had to be the bigger person in this, so it's not fucking fair that you got everything you wanted. 

It throws you back, you know? You think that you're making so much progress, that you might even be free and clear, and then you're faced with another 30 days of forgiveness meditations, because that shit has obviously not been fully accomplished yet.

It puts things in perspective, though. It's still palpable, the urgency and the drive and the white-knuckle optimism I felt on that first plane to LA that sunny morning. I wasn't going to let this break me. I worked on my new book that whole plane ride there, determined that writing was still going to be the thing that saved me. I had no idea what I was going to do or where I was going to go next, but I had two weeks with Erica in LA to figure it all out. And it was hard, and complicated, and there were definitely a couple of teary breakdowns in the guest room of Erica and her husband Chris' apartment, but I will never forget the feeling that I knew, deep down, I could do this. That I wasn't going to fail. That the panic I felt was only going to propel me to produce greater things for myself.

I kind of needed that, this week. I needed to remember that urgency. Sometimes it's really easy for me to get complacent...to feel like there's always enough time to get done with the things I want to do. To take advantage of the fact that I don't *have* to hurry up with this project, because my rent is paid and then some and so maybe I should enjoy life and watch another Law & Order marathon! But hearing news about him shines a light on all that. I'm really proud of myself for the things I've accomplished since I ended my life with him, but it's also not nearly half of what I swore to myself that I'd do. And in my better moments, I don't wish him ill will...but the fact that those feelings above still come up in my weaker ones is a sign that there is still more work to do. Because the point is not whether or not he deserves to be happy. The point is that I deserve to be, and that's much easier to do with a clean heart.