I missed her

I’ve been wondering lately if maybe I’m just not relationship material.

This has been one of those thoughts that wanders into my head uninvited, eats everything in the refrigerator and refuses to leave.

Maybe I’m simply better alone.

Maybe I missed some essential relationship gene.

Maybe after all these years I should finally admit that I’m incapable of doing the thing everybody else seems determined to do, which is locate another human being and slowly combine two lives until nobody remembers whose Tupperware is whose.

And then this morning I thought:

What a crock of shit.

I’m perfectly capable of love.

I’ve loved deeply, loyally, stupidly, extravagantly, inconveniently and occasionally well beyond the point where any sensible person would have gathered up her belongings and called an Uber.

Love has never been my problem.

For a while I even had this lovely metaphor going about thinking somebody else was my lifeguard and eventually learning how to swim for myself.

Fuck the lifeguard. She can go supervise the kiddie pool.

I don’t need another metaphor about somebody saving me. I’m done making somebody else the central character in a story about discovering myself.

Maybe the question isn’t whether I’m capable of love.

Maybe the question is whether I’m still willing to trade freedom for belonging.

And I don’t think I am.

That feels different.

Because I like love. Love is terrific. I highly recommend it. I’m just increasingly suspicious of the enormous administrative apparatus we’ve built around it.

Apparently once you love somebody, there are meetings.

There are schedules.

There are negotiations about dinner.

There are discussions about where you are going, when you will be back, who else will be there, what you are doing Thursday, what “we” are doing next month and whether the thermostat really needs to be at 70.

At some point love apparently acquired middle management.

I don’t want to merge anymore.

I don’t want to be half of anything. And I sure as hell don’t need somebody to complete me. I have spent seventy-six years assembling this particular contraption. Some of the parts are original, some have been replaced, several are held together with profanity, and the warranty expired sometime during the Carter administration.

But I am complete.

I am not, however, finished.

That distinction has become enormously important to me.

Complete does not mean done.

I have no idea who I’m going to be next year. I don’t know what I’m going to become obsessed with next, what I’m going to stop believing, what I’m going to write, where I’m going to go, what ridiculous project will suddenly become absolutely essential, or which conviction I currently hold will eventually make me slap my forehead and say, “Jesus, Kathi.”

I love that.

I’m seventy-six years old and I am still curious as hell.

Maybe more curious than I have ever been.

And curiosity requires room.

I want to wake up wondering about something and spend half the day following it somewhere completely useless. I want to read one paragraph that sends me looking for a book that sends me looking for another book that somehow ends with me at four in the morning staring at Orion wondering what some woman standing under those same stars ten thousand years ago thought she was seeing.

This is a perfectly reasonable use of my time.

I want to understand why civilizations rise and collapse. Why human beings need tribes. Why we can know we are destroying the planet and still worry about whether Amazon can get something here by Tuesday. Why intelligent people believe contradictory things. Why we confuse certainty with intelligence. Why consciousness exists. Why anything exists.

And why everybody is apparently so fucking terrified of being alone.

I want depth.

I have never been particularly interested in the shallow end of anything.

Tell me what you believe and why you believe it. Tell me what changed you. Tell me what frightened you when you were eight. Tell me the thing you believe that you’re afraid to say out loud. Tell me whether you think consciousness ends when the machinery shuts down. Tell me what you regret. Tell me what you would do differently if nobody were watching.

I don’t particularly care what you bought at Costco.

Unless Costco has begun selling enlightenment in twelve-packs, in which case I’m listening.

This appetite for depth can make ordinary social life a little awkward. People are perfectly happy discussing weather, television and people who aren’t currently in the room while I’m standing there wondering whether industrial civilization was an evolutionary wrong turn.

I recognize this is not always ideal cocktail-party behavior.

But I like this woman.

I missed her.

And I don’t want to lose her again.

That may be what I protected least when I was in relationships. Not independence exactly. Something subtler and more precious: the ability to follow myself wherever my mind wanted to go.

Belonging can quietly interfere with that.

Belonging sounds lovely. Somebody waiting for you. Somebody knowing where you are. Somebody saying “we.”

But belonging can become expensive.

A little compromise here. A little accommodation there. You stop doing something because it bothers them. You start doing something because it pleases them. You swallow a thought because this isn’t a good time. You postpone something because there are two schedules now.

None of it looks particularly alarming.

That’s the trick.

You make yourself slightly smaller, then slightly smaller again, and every individual adjustment seems perfectly reasonable. Then one day you discover you’re living in a house built entirely out of reasonable adjustments and wondering where the hell you went.

Nobody even has to be the villain.

Two perfectly decent people can love each other and still construct a life in which one or both gradually disappears.

Sometimes what disappears isn’t even obvious. You still have your clothes. Your friends. Your opinions. Your favorite chair.

But you’ve stopped wandering.

You’ve stopped surprising yourself.

You’ve stopped asking what else might be possible.

That scares me considerably more than being alone.

I know how to belong.

I’m just not sure I want to anymore.

I want intimacy without ownership. Affection without surveillance. Loyalty without jurisdiction.

I want someone to miss me without needing to know where I am.

I want to be able to say, “I’m going away for three weeks,” without immediately scheduling a committee meeting.

And I want the same freedom for anybody I love.

That matters.

Freedom isn’t me getting to do whatever the hell I want while somebody waits faithfully at home polishing my emotional silverware. Freedom has to run both directions or it’s just selfishness wearing Oofos.

If I don’t want to be owned, I don’t get to own anybody.

If I want room to change, I have to give somebody else room to change.

If I want my life to remain unmistakably mine, I have to love someone enough to let hers remain unmistakably hers.

Maybe that kind of romantic love exists.

Maybe it doesn’t.

Here’s the part that surprises me:

I’m not terribly concerned about finding out.

That may be the biggest change of all.

For most of our lives, especially for women, partnership is treated as evidence that everything turned out okay.

Somebody chose you.

Somebody stayed.

You belong to somebody.

We even use possession as romantic language. My wife. My partner. My person.

It’s sweet until you think about it too long, which unfortunately is one of my hobbies.

I don’t want to belong to anybody.

I want to belong to myself.

And strangely, that hasn’t made me less capable of loving people. I think it may be making me better at it.

Because now when I love someone, I don’t need them to become infrastructure.

They don’t have to hold up the roof. They don’t have to provide meaning. They don’t have to reassure me that I matter, entertain me, validate me or stand between me and loneliness.

They can simply be another human being whose existence delights me.

Imagine that.

Love without a job description.

And there is so much to love that has nothing whatsoever to do with partnership.

I love my family. I love my friends. I love children who can make me grin just by thinking about them. I love people who wander into my life for an afternoon and leave something behind. I love people I rarely see but would drive through a snowstorm for.

I love ideas.

I love questions.

I love books that piss me off.

I love conversations that rearrange the furniture in my head.

I even love discovering that I’m wrong, although I reserve the right to be irritated about it for twenty minutes first.

I love this ridge in Wisconsin where the wind blows like it has a personal grievance and the sky occasionally puts on a show so extravagant it makes every human argument seem embarrassing.

And I love my own company.

I missed that.

Maybe that is what I’m most unwilling to surrender now. Not solitude for solitude’s sake, but the astonishing freedom of being able to hear my own mind again.

There is still so much I don’t know.

That thrills me.

At seventy-six, I have absolutely no interest in arriving.

I want another idea that knocks me sideways. Another place I haven’t stood. Another person who tells me something I’ve never considered. Another night under the stars when some question occurs to me that ruins a perfectly good night’s sleep.

I want to keep digging beneath the obvious until I hit something real.

So maybe I’m not bad at relationships.

Maybe I’ve simply become very expensive.

The price of admission is that I get to remain entirely myself.

No shrinking.

No ownership.

No emotional border patrol.

No surrendering my solitude because somebody else finds it threatening.

No confusing proximity with intimacy.

And nobody gets to close the door on my curiosity.

I am perfectly capable of love.

I’m just no longer willing to trade my freedom for belonging.

If that means I spend the rest of my life gloriously unfinished, wandering around my little piece of Wisconsin, looking at the sky, asking inappropriate questions, changing my mind, writing things that annoy people and following whatever rabbit hole has captured my attention that particular morning, I can live with that.

In fact, I think I might fucking love it.

Barely remember

I don’t want my old loves back.

I want to sit beside them for a minute

in the rooms where we once lived

and thank them for knowing me

when I was someone

I can barely remember being

The Trait You Fall in Love With

I am beginning to suspect that one of the more painful lessons of adulthood is this:

The thing that hurts you in the end is often the very thing that attracted you in the beginning.

Not always.

But often enough.

Recently I found myself thinking about the silent treatment and the peculiar pain it causes. Researchers have found that being ignored can trigger some of the same neural pathways associated with physical pain. We tend to think of silence as the absence of action, but it rarely feels that way to the person receiving it.

Silence can feel like a verdict.

A dismissal.

A door closing without explanation.

As I thought about this, one particular relationship came to mind.

Looking back, I can see qualities in that person that fascinated me from the start. There was an edge to her. A self-containment. A willingness to remain unmoved by things that seemed to sway everyone else.

She was not easily impressed.

Not easily persuaded.

Not easily reached.

At the time, I mistook some of those qualities for strength.

Perhaps some of them were.

But age has a way of teaching us that strength and hardness can look remarkably similar from a distance.

The difference only becomes clear when life requires tenderness.

There is something undeniably magnetic about people who seem untouchable. They move through the world with a certain gravity. They appear immune to the endless need for approval that drives so much human behavior.

They seem free.

What I didn’t understand then was that the qualities we admire in people rarely travel alone.

Confidence often arrives with stubbornness.

Independence may arrive with emotional distance.

Intensity may arrive with volatility.

And sometimes the traits that draw us in are inseparable from the traits that eventually wound us.

I don’t know whether people change as much as we think they do.

More often, I suspect we simply move closer.

And what looked like mystery from across the room becomes something else entirely when we’re living inside its orbit.

The uncomfortable truth is that I think I saw some of this all along.

Not clearly.

Not consciously.

But in flashes.

Moments that didn’t quite fit the story I wanted to tell myself.

Small warning lights that I interpreted as signs of depth.

Because hope is a gifted editor.

It has a remarkable ability to remove inconvenient details from the manuscript.

When we care deeply about someone, we often don’t lie to ourselves outright. We simply place greater emphasis on the evidence we’d prefer to believe.

We become curators of possibility.

Collectors of exceptions.

Believers in future revisions.

We tell ourselves that love will soften the sharp edges.

That understanding will heal old wounds.

That intimacy will reveal hidden tenderness.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

The older I get, the less interested I am in being captivated and the more interested I am in being met.

Charm fades.

Mystery eventually explains itself.

Intensity comes and goes like weather.

But kindness remains.

Not performative kindness.

Not politeness.

Not agreeableness.

I mean the kind of kindness that stays human when disappointed.

The kind that tells the truth instead of punishing.

The kind that communicates instead of withdrawing.

The kind that remembers there is another nervous system on the receiving end of our actions.

I used to think strength was found in the ability to remain untouched.

Now I wonder if real strength looks more like remaining open.

Remaining honest.

Remaining kind.

Even when it would be easier not to.

Perhaps that is one of the hidden gifts of heartbreak.

It teaches us that attraction and compatibility are not the same thing.

It teaches us that fascination is not the same thing as trust.

And sometimes it teaches us that the qualities most worthy of building a life around are not the ones that make our pulse race in the beginning.

They are the ones that make us feel safe enough to exhale years later.

Sometimes the silence that wounds us most is also the silence that finally tells us the truth.

Not about the other person.

About ourselves.

About what we were willing to overlook.

About what we actually need.

And about the difference between being enchanted by someone’s strength and being nourished by their kindness.

Because there are still butterflies

I think I have finally stopped arguing with the dashboard. For years I kept driving while the warning lights blinked at me. Energy. Climate. Debt. Growth. Another light. Another little red symbol. Another expert telling us not to worry because somebody somewhere was working on a better battery. So we kept driving.

We changed presidents. Changed lightbulbs. Bought reusable grocery bags. Put solar panels on roofs and windmills on ridges and congratulated ourselves for producing electricity without asking nearly enough questions about the enormous industrial civilization required to manufacture all the stuff producing it. Meanwhile, we kept building bigger houses, bigger trucks, bigger data centers, bigger expectations. Eight billion people wanting refrigerators and air conditioning and strawberries in January, and who the hell can blame them?

That’s the part nobody wants to talk about. I don’t blame people for wanting a comfortable life. I like mine. I like flipping a switch and having lights come on. I like hot water. Refrigeration. My car. My phone. Coffee that traveled farther to reach my kitchen than most people travel on vacation. I’m not standing outside civilization throwing rocks at it. I’m sitting inside it with everybody else.

That’s where radical acceptance begins for me. Not with guilt. Not with optimism. Not with another fucking list of ten things I can personally do to save the planet before breakfast. Just this: This is the world we actually built.

It runs on enormous quantities of energy. It requires extraction. It requires growth to keep an economy built around growth from choking on itself. And it exists on a finite planet that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about our economic models. Those things can all be true at once. That’s the dashboard. And radical acceptance means I finally quit putting electrical tape over the warning lights.

I don’t know exactly what happens next. Maybe we’re clever enough to soften the landing. Maybe technology buys us more time. Maybe we learn to live with less because we choose to. Maybe we live with less because eventually there isn’t another choice. Probably some messy combination of all of it.

But I no longer need to believe somebody is coming to fix everything in order to get out of bed in the morning. Strangely, that’s been freeing. Because once I stopped demanding a happy ending, I started noticing the life that is still happening before the ending has even been written.

The monarch on the zinnia. Onions pulled out of Wisconsin dirt. Cows talking somewhere below the ridge before sunrise. A stranger sleeping safely in one of my little cabins. A cold beer. A warm body. A ridiculous conversation. August slipping toward September whether the Dow goes up or down.

None of those things fixes anything. That’s precisely the point.

Maybe radical acceptance at this stage of civilization isn’t crawling into a bunker. Maybe it’s sitting down beside this enormous, beautiful, wounded, energy-hungry world and saying, “Well hell. I guess we’re in this together.”

And then planting the damn flowers anyway. Not because they’ll save the world.

Because there are still butterflies.