Met My Old Lover in the Grocery Store…

Met my old lover in the grocery store.  It wasn’t Christmas Eve but a couple of weeks before. I didn’t recognize you at first, we hugged in the dairy department and that’s where it ends. It wasn’t the sweet reminiscing that a former manifestation of my Self might have magicalized into being. I thought I didn’t trust you emotionally, always leaving the door ajar and calling it something different. “Strange,” you said. “I was just thinking about you on my way here and I never come here.”

I stood, slightly apart from us and watched it all…a spiraling report of measures of success unimportant to me, judgements characteristic of you. If I’d been fully embodied, I might have changed the current and asked, “What sorrows have you known and how did you learn to move through them? What joyful memories do you hold on to, even if they have to stay kindly tucked away in a life where they no longer fit?  What is one true truth that lives deeply in your marrow? What do you think about when you stand in solitude and look into the starry night sky?” 

Your previous attempts to establish remote connection in honor of all those years together when we were shaping ourselves made me wary. I was always left with the feeling that you needed something from me that you wouldn’t admit—Approval? Admiration? Acknowledgement? Now, here we stood face-to-face decades later, and I realized there had been a puzzle in me I was unaware of and the pieces began to take shape. These are the formative  impressions I’d have wanted to share with you if our encounter was like the song, but accompanied by all their counterweights.

I remember our first kiss late on an autumn night in the quiet darkness of my parents’ living room. Somehow more intimate than pressing your lips to mine, you first kissed the top of my head. I felt from you a mixture of passion and preparation…of first intentionally soaking up a kind of caring you felt for me. You also told me my patchouli perfume left the unpleasant sensory impression of tree bark or dirt.

I still have a picture of us together at a wedding early on, you holding the tip of my extended index finger between your thumb and finger,  caressingly. And I also remember you telling me that you found my feet unattractive and then I didn’t wear shoes that exposed my toes for years. 

I remember the exhilarating buzz in my brain of stimulating conversation. I thought you were brilliant and I felt smart and expansive in our long, lingering exchanges over morning coffee. You also told me that my academic success was the result of me taking easy classes and you asked me why I didn’t speak the way I wrote.

You told me that I was pure and the best person you knew and that the world didn’t know what to do with me. You also told me that I was pretentious about not being pretentious and that the only reason you hadn’t cheated on me was that you lacked the confidence.

On a break of months and finally feeling the blossoming of life possibilities, the 6th sense hairs on your neck must have risen. You came back and proclaimed it had been me all along. I didn’t know how to say “no thank you” even when you told me two weeks later you were going away to school in a month. I used distance, I suppose, to hold on to some liberation I couldn’t outright claim for my own.

You introduced me to divine smells, textures and tastes and bought me meals that might have taken me years to discover on my own. But you complained that I didn’t know how to take care of myself while your family footed your bills.  I just finished paying off my student loans. 

I treasured so much of the world’s possibilities that you brought into focus for me but never fully honored the ways in which you also tore them down. How sweet it might have been in this accidental meeting to feel something here was missed or lost, even if it would have left some meloncholy on my heart. That was not to be.

If I had any reason to seek you out another time, it would be to say that I stand corrected. It was, in truth, my Self I didn’t trust to keep me emotionally safe, deeply socialized to see the best in others, protect their fragility, and hold onto to potential long past its expiration date. I didn’t understand my power, know how to take up enough space for the marvel that was—is—me. I did not know that you needed to be written out of me and now it is done. I am no longer puzzled. Rather, I am fortified in my vulnerable strength. There is no Auld Lang Syne without the equal weight of all the cumulative chipped away chunks. And now the haunting is expelled. Let us Rest in Peace. 

Not the Same Old Lang Syne.