The Window Shut The Door (or, backwards healing)

My little storm had been brewing for couple of weeks. The tears were there, in the corners of my temples, and I just couldn’t make them come out. Two Fridays ago, I was so sad and needed to cry so badly that I was mentally scrolling through my log of past friends and acquaintances to think of anyone I could call who might hate me, just so that that person would make me cry. If I’d had a video store nearby that was still open I would have gone and picked up Beaches or When A Man Loves A Woman. I tried listening to Susie Suh, Damien Rice, Sarah Maclachlan, anyone who would depress me, and I even squirmed under my bed to find the banned CD's that remind me of my ex. And finally I uncorked a bottle of red wine in a last-ditch attempt to somehow pull out the tears that so desperately needed to come. Still...nothing.

This Thursday, while hurriedly, scattily, getting myself ready for two classes and a subsequent semi-date, they came. Not just one tear, not just two tears, but a torrent of tears that so intensely progressed to a type of crying where my body forced me down into a curled-up sitting position on the floor and I had to hug my knees like I was afraid I was going to lose all of my pieces if I didn't physically concentrate on keeping them together.

The anger came with the tears. Not at me, at him - at my ex. In the form of “fuck you, how could you put me in this position to have to try again, to have to arrange dates and dress myself up and shift my life around so I can begin this process all over.” And then the root of the anger came: after all of his promises, after for the first time in my life I had allowed myself to believe that I would actually love someone and be loved – forever – in the way that is right, by the person who was right – it was all just a fallacy. A fucking fallacy that he let me hold onto in order to satisfy his own egotistical insanity and his selfish need to be loved.

I’m all for the supposed order of the grieving process, but anger had never hit me like this. Sometime in December, I had accepted that we were no longer together, and that it might even be for the better. And it was okay. But it was like I had skipped that step of feeling angry. Sure, I’d felt the occasional spurt of feeling slightly pissed off, of seeing things with renewed clarity, such as “oh wow he snooped through my stuff and probably even read my emails,” but I had never felt angry. I had felt like things made more sense and that I had understood him a little better, but I had not felt angry. For me, the anger came later than the acceptance, and according to traditional psychology, I should have had this all wrapped up in December.

Thursday night was probably the first of many dates I’ll go on, with the first of many people, but for me it was something else. Getting ready to go out with someone I could potentially like was not the beginning of a chapter I could entitle "Dating Again" – it was, more importantly, the end of one. In a classic TV moment, in my favorite episode of Friends, Rachel puts it quite dramatically before throwing a stranger’s cell phone into a glass of water: “and that, my friend, is what they call CLOSURE.” And although it's months after the fact, maybe I did need to go through that bit of anger before achieving full closure, and maybe it needed to be triggered by something. I'll never hate him, but I guess I did need to be angry, at least for a little while. I’m not exactly glad that the tears chose that moment, those hours, but they needed to be released and I let myself release them. Yet in doing so, I was not opening a window, but I was firmly acknowledging that the door, a door I never thought would have even needed to be built, had not merely been slammed shut but had been locked and bolted for good.