Bare to the Elements

Dawna left.

She left after a late breakfast this morning.

I tried to stay strong for her. Before she left, I thanked her for staying these extra two days. I told her that it helped.

And it did.

It really fucking did.

Having two more days with her gave me time to process the fact that she was leaving. Two more mornings. Two more nights. Two more days of walking through the house and seeing her there. Two more days of this strange new life that has somehow become completely normal to me in almost no fucking time at all.

But I also told her I was going to be sad.

Of fucking course I'm going to be sad.

I told her I'm a good Swedish American, though, and good Swedish Americans cry alone.

She'll never see me cry.

That's not entirely true.

She probably will eventually.

But she won't see it very often.

It's how I was raised. It's in my fucking blood. It's in my genes. You hold your shit together. You deal with your emotions privately. You don't burden somebody else with them.

So Thursday morning, when I thought she was leaving, I lay in bed beside her and cried.

She was asleep.

I made sure my back was toward her.

Today, when she actually left, I held myself together.

And now here I am, several hours later.

Yeah.

It's fucking hitting me.

Hard.

When she's here, it feels like she's home.

No.

That's not quite right.

When she's here, it feels like I'm home.

That's the part I wasn't prepared for.

I've lived in this house for years. I've slept in this bedroom. I've walked these hallways. I've parked motorcycles in that garage. I've cooked in this kitchen and sat at this keyboard and built an entire fucking life inside these walls.

It was always my house.

Then Dawna came here and somehow it became home.

She put deodorant on the bathroom counter.

She rearranged the bedroom.

She left little pieces of herself everywhere.

I'd ride down the alley after work and the garage door would start opening before I could even reach for my keys because she heard me coming.

And there she'd be.

Smiling.

Excited that I was home.

Fuck.

My heart was so fucking full.

And now the house feels empty.

They say distance makes the heart grow fonder or some stupid shit like that.

Fuck that.

Distance makes my heart fucking hurt.

I'm sitting here staring into our newly rearranged bedroom, riding the edge of a tear with every fucking breath.

She rearranged this room.

For us.

And now she's gone.

The room isn't actually empty. All the furniture is still here. Her things are still here. Everything is exactly where we left it.

But fuck, it feels empty.

Hollow.

For so fucking long, I walked through this world alone.

Hell, even when I was supposedly with someone, I was alone.

It was never really about me. I wasn't much of a consideration in the "relationships" I was part of before. I learned not to expect someone to worry about my heart because my heart wasn't something anyone seemed particularly concerned about.

So I adapted.

That's what survivors fucking do.

I built walls.

Big ones.

Thick ones.

I protected my heart from the elements. Protected it from other people. Protected it from disappointment and rejection and all the other shit that happens when you hand someone the softest parts of yourself and trust them not to crush them.

Eventually, I got pretty fucking good at it.

I got used to being alone.

Hell, I convinced myself I preferred it.

There was a certain freedom in it. Nobody could disappoint me if I didn't need anybody. Nobody could abandon me if I was perfectly happy standing by myself. Nobody could break my heart if I simply refused to hand the fucking thing over.

It worked.

For years.

Then Dawna came along.

And somehow, without me really understanding when it happened, the walls came down.

Not all at once.

She didn't smash through them.

She didn't demand that I tear them down.

She just loved me.

Wholly.

Fully.

She cared about how I felt. She noticed when I was hurting. She listened. She stayed.

She looks me in the eyes and tells me that she chooses me.

And eventually, somewhere along the way, I stopped protecting myself from her.

I let her in.

Completely.

And Jesus fucking Christ, I wasn't prepared for what that would mean.

Because nobody tells you this part.

Taking down the walls doesn't just let love in.

It leaves your heart exposed.

For fifty-four years, I've been learning how to protect myself from the elements. How to protect my heart. How to protect my emotions. How to survive disappointment and loneliness and loss.

And now suddenly I'm standing here without the armor.

Bare to the fucking elements.

Raw.

So fucking raw.

And when she's here, that's the most incredible feeling in the world.

There's nothing between us.

No walls.

No armor.

No bullshit.

Just her heart and mine.

But when she leaves?

Fuck.

There's nothing protecting me from that either.

I know this is temporary.

I know she's coming back.

I know we have an entire life ahead of us. We just got fucking engaged. There are plans to make and logistics to figure out and two separate lives that we're slowly going to turn into one.

I know all of that.

My brain understands every fucking bit of it.

My heart doesn't give a shit.

My heart knows that she was here this morning.

And now she isn't.

So I'm sitting in this cold room, choking back tears while I stare at the bedroom she rearranged for us.

Missing the fuck out of her.

Maybe that's the price.

Maybe this is what happens when you finally stop merely surviving and actually let yourself love somebody.

You lose the protection that came with being alone.

And maybe I don't want it back.

That's the fucked-up part.

As much as this hurts right now, I don't want the walls back.

I don't want the armor.

I don't want to become good at being alone again.

I spent enough of my fucking life doing that.

I'd rather sit here with tears streaming down my face, missing the woman I love, than go back to being someone who couldn't be hurt because she wouldn't let anybody close enough to matter.

Because Dawna matters.

She matters enough to hurt.

And fuck, do I miss her.