Swimming

Being the person I want to be, sometimes, can be so hard. Sometimes, it can feel impossible. The bad parts in me - the incredible selfishness, the temper, the drama, the impatience, the impetuousness - rise up with such power, with such force, that they feel like a tidal wave I can't fight against: one that will crush me and carry me into a dark, hard place that will be nothing like the place I was swimming towards. And sometimes I am so tired that it seems like the easiest thing in the world just to stop. To let go, and let myself be swept - limp and exhausted - back to the place where I can destroy, and rant, and demand and control and be a subject of my own whims and emotions and passions. Even if it means that I can no longer hold my head up, because it is ground into the sand.

It's too easy. Too easy to be bad. Too easy to be selfish. Too easy to be crazy. Too easy to do what I want to do, sometimes, even if it's not good for me. And when I'm hurting, it becomes even easier. To forget about dignity, and pride, and honesty, and integrity. To forget about the things that I value more than I value getting what I want, which is - when I'm tired, when I'm exhausted - all I can ever really think about. No matter how hard I try not to.

In short, I'm still heartbroken. I'm not over The Boy; not even slightly. I'm functioning again - I'm eating, I'm sleeping, I'm laughing, I'm playing with the children, I'm enjoying my friends, I'm seeing again (the sky, the buildings around me, the people on the train next to me: all obliterated in the immediate pain of the breakup) - but I'm not whole. I think about him all of the time. I miss him all of the time. I want him back, all of the time. And every time I try to push my love for him away - to put it in a little box with a Christmas ribbon, and tuck it away somewhere where I can't find it when I'm drunk or emotional - I can't do it. It's too tangible, as if I can prod it with my fingers, and it makes me feel simultaneously heavy and slightly sick - as if I've eaten too much of something bad for me - and empty, as if I've vomited everything that was good.

Every day, still, is a struggle against him. A struggle to let him go. To be a good person. To fight my instincts - the instincts that want to ring him, and text him, and email him, and tell him when something good happens, and when something bad happens, and when something irrelevant happens, just because I want him to know that it's happening, and to know that I'm still alive and hurting - and behave with dignity, and pride, and self respect. Because every day feels like I'm wading through a thick, sticky river of minutes without him, and every crowd is crammed full of faces that are not him. And the absence of him - the space that he has left behind - feels so heavy that it's hard to stand up; and contacting him feels like the only possible way I can make it lighter, even if for a tiny, tiny while.

But I have no choice. I either give in - and get swept into the wave of selfishness and vague stalkerdom - or I fight it, and try to push through: hope that soon the minutes will get less sticky, and the crowds will have their own faces and not just an absence of his. That the weight will be lighter, in time. Because I have to have the grace and dignity that are more important to me than love; that are more important to me, even, than happiness. And anger and emotion and futile text messages are not going to give me them. Only walking away can do that.

I'm not sure I'll ever quite be the person I want to be; that I'll ever have the peace, and grace, and bravery, and dignity, of the future self I am constantly swimming towards. But this is not the heartbreak that will take me back to the shore, and leave me broken on the sand. It is the heartbreak that I will hold onto like a raft: that will, perhaps, eventually - one day, when I least expect it - carry me with it, and take me that little bit closer.