Loved One

by Aisha Muharrar

I saw that I’d romanticized being a beginner. There was a queasy unease to treading new waters, building the compass as you sailed, every choice a guess.

I found self-consciousness in men endearing.

We could chatter for hours, and we could exchange one word and immediately crack up. It was like finding out someone else was fluent in a language you thought you had invented. Like you were the last surviving member of a cultural group with a specific dialect, and then discovered that across the world, someone had spontaneously picked it up.

Now if I drove through LA, I could point out all the coffee shops, music venues, trails, restaurants, bars, and the places friends used to live, where, for nearly a decade, Gabe and I spent our lives.

There is something about a city that isn’t yours. Perhaps better than a beach vacation is the trip to a new city, the luxury of walking leisurely through a busy metropolis, observing a hustle that does not require your participation.

most people don’t think rationally—but now I understood how often I’d ascribed cosmic causality to life’s surprises. There was no harm to déjà vu, destiny, the Universe working for you when things were going well. My parents never went to church, they’d both rejected organized religion. But it turned out I had organized my own religion, one that relied on what I now saw as the seemingly romantic, but ultimately cruel, philosophy that Everything Happens For A Reason. Without this private logic, I was vulnerable; it was a crisis of faith.

Had anyone ever felt as passionately about anything as this woman felt about breathwork? Saints and poets were amateurs compared to wellness converts.

guys broke promises I didn’t even ask them to make.

Sometimes when someone is feeling awful about themselves, you have to let them get it all out and not intervene, otherwise it becomes a screaming match between you and that awful voice in their head. No one ever wins against that voice.

When I thought about it, I gravitated to honest women who would tell it like it was. I think I got a vicarious thrill, watching them shoot from the hip while I remained inside my head with all my doubts and ruminations.