Our Wedding Week

our love story is my favorite

When I met Anaya I was one of the messiest versions of my adult self I had ever been. Quite literally bruised and broken, all the most tender parts of me. I was highly traumatized by a lifetime’s worth of <fill in the blanks> and the specific kind found in mothers, and more specifically, the single ones. I was beyond burned out, I didn’t have language for the type of exhaustion I felt on a cellular level. In all of the ways leaving my ex-husband healed parts of my brain and body, I was far from reaching the type of peace and rest I craved. The type of peace that comes with knowing there was an end in sight.

xxx

I haven’t been suicidal since I was a teenager, at least not to the level of wanting to actually be so far gone that I was willing to act on it. To complete.

When the pushing and the going and the pep-talks and even the therapy the community the walks the water the bright spots, the high notes- when none of it felt reassuring enough to know that I was able to keep myself here not even for me but for my children, I got help.

This isn’t what this week’s letter is about, though. I’ve written about it and shared it several times, but rather it’s the fact that Anaya met me when I was here and I let him have it. I met him shortly after I had asked for help. And I wanted him to have it. All of the mess. None of the glamour that the freshly-dating and new-relationship smoke and mirrors provides. I was guarded, highly protective, and I cried a lot. I wanted to show him all of this, all of me, unequivocally. My intentions of this backfired, of course. What I had sought to do was prove that this version of me wasn’t worthy despite the fact that I wasn’t saying that out loud. Who would want that. That messy, poor, single mother of two very young children. The one with the shitty car and the low income housing that never did qualify for food-stamps due to a shitty system combined with the lack of executive function.

Anaya did.

xxx

I recently had a conversation with my therapist about the last several years and just taking it in. The type of honesty I gave to Anaya-

Me: I don’t know what I’m doing. I know my heart and what I want. I know I have so much healing to do.

Anaya: me too.

This is it. Anaya didn’t save me. He didn’t swoop in with a fat salary and the answers to all of my problems. He simply was. It was two people standing before one another saying, we’re fucked for very similar and very different reasons but I love you and I want to figure it out by myself and also with and within you.

It was and has been my greatest lesson in healthy, reciprocal, consistent, and honest love.

I don’t have a magic formula for love. Our relationship certainly is not perfect. We have our own individual trauma, 35+ years worth, that seeps in and bleeds on the work that we’ve done individually and as a couple. Things get messy sometimes. I have an affinity for raising my voice and Anaya is horrified of yelling. Anaya’s pragmatism can come across as cold and dismissive but really it’s simply the way he processes information in addition to being on the spectrum. While I have had a head start in terms of timelines when it comes to parenting neither of us have ever parented an almost 8 year old and almost 4 year old. Neither of us have had the space or room in the past to do the type of individual healing that we both do now. If you are putting out fire after fire around you or for someone else, a lot of your own work feels backburner’d regardless of intention. I was, we both were, long before one another, doing our work, but there is a unique type of healing that happens when the world around you also slows down long enough to get your feet underneath you instead of merely treading water.

The spring equinox is here and regardless of your beliefs let this be a time to revel in planting seeds, all types. I don’t believe it was merely coincidence that we found one another just as the days began to find a new balance and rhythm. That the season boasted rebirth and hope for what was to come. That is my relationship with Anaya. It is nurturing and new. Both an anecdote and salve for generating life in different ways. It is a duality of what can be achieved when we tend to our lightest and darkest selves. An exploration and dismantling of Western ideals in all forms whether it be nuclear families, gender, chosen family, colonization, and what it means to simply be here.

What makes our love our love is the radical and restorative ways in which we approach all of this and us and ourselves and our kids and the world. A queer love letter to our younger selves, our friends, our community, and our children. Writing about love can seem fraught or saccharine and ours is neither. I write about our love and think about our love the same ways I think about and write about decolonizing our brains, the same way I write about food and what it means to culture, what it means to subvert the narrative from yet another Denver’s Best list. I write about our love and our family as a lighthouse. Don’t turn to our love when you want smoke and mirrors but rather when you need to feel hope.

I wouldn’t have been able to do the type of healing I have done for myself, specifically for my very young self, had it not been for the respite of Anaya’s love and the walls of our relationship. I wouldn’t have been able to come up for air as much as I do now. I originally felt shame about this- am I actually beginning to heal if I can’t do this on my own?

But I don’t believe in individualism as a means of Every Man For Themselves. I don’t think that humans are designed that way. I don’t believe in boot-strapping, I don’t believe that we are meant to have one’s self all figured out as if there were a plane ticket to purchase, a destination. So why this? Why attempt to shoulder the weight of it all on my own, all on your own? If the rules apply to everyone else, surely they apply to me. Surely they apply to you.

If ever there is a time you are reading my work and thinking, “surely this person isn’t glorifying or posturing the fact that a man came and fixed her.” Do you? My intention is to share and show that it isn’t that he fixed me or that somehow I fixed him but that we looked at each other’s shit, the bags and piles of shit, the lifetimes of other people’s abuse and words and places and hands and shit and we said, I’m in.

That’s the point. The duality of holding what’s solely mine, what’s solely his, and what is ours, tossing it onto Shit Mountain and saying, I can do this because I’m choosing to do it with and within, and for you and myself, simultaneously. Anaya didn’t fix me, he gave me room to breathe and in order to get a grasp on your own shit, you’ve got to be able to breathe.

Where our story is fairytale it is also reality. I have slammed doors literally and figuratively. We have made each other cry. We have both walked out.

Albeit brief. Albeit just moments.

This isn’t perfect and if it was that would be the problem.

I hope that if you have not yet, and if it is something you want, you find the type of love that holds and challenges you. I hope you find a radical and transformative love, one that makes you see the world differently. I hope that you can access the type of healing that can be done in the shadowiest parts of your body if there’s someone that’s holding your hand the way he’s holding mine on the outside.

I hope you are safe. I hope everyone gets to experience this type of safety in their lifetime.

My lucky numbers are 23/32 which is why they are mirrored in a way on my left index finger. Anaya’s lucky number is five. We met on March 23rd, we will bet getting married on March 23rd.

2 + 3 = 5

It’s cute, hey? Baseline, it’s cute.

But what with the spring equinox, the rebirthing, the numerology, the story, the all of it. His number 5 sits on my right index finger, and I love our love.

I am proud of our love.

My biggest piece of advice for love is to decide what it actually means to settle. Anaya and I are lovers of love and we love hard. We loved hard before one another, we want our lovers to feel it. We also got stuck in spaces in the past that told us that whatever was in front of us could quite possibly be the best thing we would find. Therefore, we gave our hard love to people far longer than we should have. Yes, because we are hard lovers, but also because we were both scared of being alone. Funny, isn’t it? Neither of us are actually afraid of being alone. Being alone is easier in a lot of ways. But when we found a love or a partner, we wanted that to work for a laundry list of reasons but mostly because neither of us like to fail. We will make just about anything work, really.

I can only speak for myself while I know Anaya’s truth because we have talked about it at length but for now I’ll share my thoughts and truth about how do you know? How do you know that this wasn’t that. How do you know when you’ve actually managed to get off the fucking ferris wheel?

I know that it is different this time for a lot of reasons, there isn’t one single piece that makes it true but we are genuinely interested in one another and not just sexually or even platonically/as friends. Anaya inspires me. When we do argue or when there is conflict, even if we initially fumble it at first or get it wrong, our desire for repair is the same. We do it differently but it is the fact that when we do hurt one another we genuinely want to learn how to avoid it for the next time. We talk and we talk and when something stings or when I am too sarcastic or he is too cerebral we talk. We tell each other what feels good, we tell each other what stings. We call each other out when one of us is being prickly at our kids. We talk about the future.

The future.

The future.

The future.

Anaya and I are alive now longer than either of us thought we would be.

Anaya is the first person I have experienced so much with but also the first person I have been able to talk about the future with and him talk about the future with me and instead of it feeling daunting and scary I want run with and to, not from.

The future. Who knew? There’s more to this. But when I think about our love and life in 5, 10, 20, 30 years it is how I think about it. That is when I knew it was different.

Plant something this weekend if you can. Start seeds in random things and recycled containers you find lying around. Drink a Campari spritz or a glass of champagne or a seltzer water with a bit of lavender bitters in celebration. Set some intentions for the upcoming spring. Tell you lover and/or your friends that you love them and say it with your chest.

I