Changing with the tide

This was about six months after the previous one, when a friend taught me how to stop mourning the loss of something I'd laid to rest, metaphorically speaking:

Someday, years from now, I will still remember the day I learned how to feel again. 

When you go through divorce, it feels a little like being beaten against a shoreline by the tide until you can’t feel the rocks anymore.  You are numb from the cold, the salt in the water, and the beating you are taking inside.  Gone is the fire of anger inside you, the pain that went ripping through you until it felt that your chest had been rent in half, and you stand, wishing the pain would go away.  Well, as a counselor once told me, sometimes blocking out the pain blocks feeling altogether… which I didn’t consider a bad thing at the time. 

I had heard "I would never" until the words took on new meaning (or rather no meaning at all, like an adult in a Charlie Brown special).  I was in a place of not moving, not breathing, not feeling anything, and certainly not believing that things would ever be okay again.  Enter, stage left, the last person I expected, a casual friend I worked with who asked me innocently if I would like to hear a song. 

Okay, play me a song.

Dangerous words from a soul who trusted almost no one anymore, I nevertheless let them drop in front of me like an absently dropped pile of laundry.  Sure, why not?  The music began, and at the edge of my vision came a warm vein like the sea sometimes has.  The equivalent of nature’s double take, I turned toward the video and the full impact of the lyrics ripped every wound wide open again, salt water rushing in like a whirlpool around me and I’m drowning.  I’m at work, barely aware that it’s a bad idea to be crying right now.  As if my heart were listening to anything but the sound of my soul drowning. 

I heard a speaker once point out that salt water can actually heal.  I wasn’t drowning in the flood of emotions because I allowed myself to feel, and though it was painful, I became acutely aware of how much I missed it.  I was now tossed up on the metaphorical beach and left to dry out in the sun.  In literal terms, I was left explaining to my poor friend that it wasn’t his fault that I was losing it over a simple YouTube video.  Some things were too fresh for me, and he’d been absolutely right that it was a powerful song.  And when he tentatively offered a hug, suddenly something shifted out of the shadows into the late evening sun again. 

Life won’t always be perfect, or pretty, and some days it won’t even come close.  But I am learning to deal with what I feel as opposed to burying it in a box in my backyard.  And quietly, someone who I barely noticed became the most important person to me, lighting a fire which used to be anger and now was simply the pulsing life-glow of my heart.  Putting out the fire was wrong, because a passionate person is only a shell of their best self without passion of any kind.  It doesn’t hurt anymore, now that I’m used to it again.  I’m learning again what it feels like to be alive.  And as for the friend, who became very important to me that day?  He gave me back my soul.  Now of course he has to deal with the monster he resurrected… but I believe he does it gladly.  Vitality beats a robot any day.