New Day

I'm gonna sing this song To let you know that you're not alone And if you're like me You need hope, coffee, and melody So sit back down Let the world keep spinning ‘round For yesterday's gone and today is waiting on you to show your face

That song always makes me think of my old church. They used to sing it there a lot. It feels very apropos. I miss that church, but I don't miss it too much. Mostly, I miss having a home.

I'm a lucky girl. I've had a pretty okay kind of life. I managed to work my way through college and graduate school to earn a decent education, despite a rough start in life. I have a working car, no loan payments, no mortgage, and a steady job, even if it doesn't inspire me. More, I have 2 sisters who always soothe my battered heart.

Yet for all that, I've never had a home. It's the one thing I've yearned for my whole life... a place where no one could kick me out or threaten to leave me. Maybe a little brick two-bedroom house with a magnolia tree in front, some place I could buy pictures for and modestly furnish, but mostly just know that I belonged. An oasis of peace and rest. I've been looking for such a place my whole life long, but it has always been just out of reach for me.

Since leaving college, I've moved 9 times in 8 years, all within the same city and suburbs. I've bought and lost all of my furniture in the moves. I've wearied my friends into non-existence through my humiliated pleas for help loading and unloading the various pieces of my life. I've lost 4 different jobs and relocated or downsized repeatedly to suit whatever employment I find. And I've survived. Like I said, I've been lucky, in this economy, to continually work and live. And I am very grateful for that.

But my heart still yearns for a home, someplace to belong. A home church. A home in someone's heart. Just a home. One of the reasons I was dating Derek was because when I kissed him, it felt like coming home.

Friends recently asked me if I hadn't any more clue why Derek and I broke up. Didn't we have the "closure" talk?

No. I don't need closure from this relationship. I am much calmer now than I was in my earlier years of dating. Much more pragmatic. What I have learned in my years of dating is that when someone wants to break up with you, you ought to let him. Why talk it out? Why reason and cry and engage in drama? Oh, I'm not saying you oughtn't to cry about it on your own. But I see no point any longer in asking "Why?"

What's the best answer you could get?

"I met someone else."

"You exhaust me."

"I don't love you in that way anymore."

"I have erectile dysfunction."

It doesn't matter what he says. None of the answers he could offer will make you feel any better, and a good many will tempt you to start defending yourself.

That's why I didn't ask Derek "why?"

I loved Derek, he's a good man. But his fatal flaw was always, always believing the worst in me. Whenever he became upset with me, his mind would fly in a million directions, all of which led to him jumping to conclusions and villainizing me. Inevitably, I would ask him leading questions, I would point out obvious discrepancies, and he would calm down and then apologize, admitting that he had no grounds for his accusations.

But every time he did it, it left a wound... until finally, last night, I didn't want to defend myself anymore, I didn't want to point out the obvious anymore. I realized that all of his wounds had made a deep impact on me. I didn't want to be with someone, amazing as he was in many, many ways, who looked at me and constantly found me lacking, constantly saw me as bad.

One time I asked Derek, "Why would you want to be with someone who is as awful as you've just accused me of being?"

He responded, "I guess because I don't think that's the real you. I think the real you is still somewhere under all that."

I submit to you, jury, that the real me is the one I've always been. The false me is the me that Derek created in his mind, and flung mud at whenever he was hurt. I will miss Derek terribly. I will miss the daisies he spontaneously bought me and finding all of my pillows smooshed up into unrecognizable shapes. I'll even miss running out of clean coffee mugs. But if we hadn't broken up, I would have missed Myself more.

I'd never find my home as long as I was someone else's bad guy, right? And that is more important to me, even than Derek.

It's a New Day, blog world! It's a new day.