It’s Leap Day today, that bonus day we get every four years, and the first one for me where I celebrate a bittersweet anniversary. The last Leap Day, in 2016, I left my husband — a ten-year relationship to someone I considered to be my best friend and my future.
A small consolation of the day was that I wouldn’t have to be reminded of the date each year — dates are tattooed in my memory no matter how much people tell me to let go — but I’d only have to recall this one every four years.
I didn’t plan it like so, but it occurred to me all the same even on the day.
(The day: his first day back from a vacation with his friends, we went to Pizza Hut and then I asked to go on a walk and told him I thought we should call it. We talked, we walked, we didn’t fight. We came back and I packed a bag and went to a hotel, where I lived and drank for the next week until I could move into an apartment on my own).
(The day: a liberating nightmare.)
(The day: the right decision and one of the worst moments of my life.)
Four years have passed, but they have been powerful years. During no period of my life so far have I changed and grown and felt more than I have in these years. My worldview crumbled then changed, my support system shifted then strengthened, my confidence collapsed then rebuilt. It’s been for the better. I can say that. There’s no part of me that regrets the decision I made four years ago.
But I want to acknowledge something else here too, something more complicated. It is still with me. Every memory and hurt and love. Time does work as promised, dulling the constant barrage, and I do go lengths without dwelling, without missing, in believing in all that closure.
But it all comes back sharp and fresh sometimes. It may always. And I both wish it would disappear and hope it never does because it — that love and its destruction — has defined me.
My therapist once told me that someday this will just be something that happened. The pain won’t be so acute. I believe her. And most of the time (for a long time now) this is true. It’s starting to feel like something that just happened, in the same way I can reflect on the self-harm of my youth with distance (pain and compassion, yes, but distance in knowing that it cannot hurt me any longer).
Yet some days that distance disintegrates and I am back there dreaming about us at our worst and at our best and I’ll call them nightmares.
Four years is enough time, but dreams don’t know the difference.
If there is an expiration on a heart breaking I have not found it yet. Even as I say with surety that we are not in love, not good for one another, and are living better lives and becoming better people apart. Still, even then, it breaks.
And still, even then, it heals. Hearts are as resilient as they are fragile. Life is as messy as it is kind.
I have felt a dourness in my bones leading up until today. I couldn’t name where this feeling was coming from at first, but I think it was memory. The body remembers ghosts of seasons past before the mind.
But today was not a day of sad reflection, it was a day of connection. I made it so.
Leap Day (coined Leaping to Freedom on my calendar for the past few months) looked like this for me:
- A 12-mile run on the trail
- Meeting friends at Salt Lick BBQ for one of my favorite meals
- Sitting in the 70-degree sun at Jester King Brewery
- Having a delectable cocktail at Treat Oak Distillery
- Enjoying good conversation with friends and having the opportunity to share my story of the day with them
- Feeling so at peace and happy and completely shaken from the negative vibes that prologued today
- And tonight: Pizza Hut, good TV, some newly bought bourbon
Happy Leap Day! Cheers to four years. Good ones. And more good ones to come.
With Love,
Natalie