Pivoting

By: Brooke Vickerman

It has been quite some months since I posted anything on here. I suppose I haven't been writing - at least not more than a few sentences at any given point. I had been sitting comfortably in the cloudy bubble of me and another person for months. It was warm and I had never felt so heard and cared for. But I read something the other day that spoke about comfort, and how it is kind of like a black hole - it has these sucking properties that make it hard to let go. Enveloping yourself fully in the orb of you and another person, becoming one another, is not a bad thing. I even recommend everyone try it once. But it gets exhausting, being in this bubble. There is no room to stretch your arms or feel the breeze pass from the tip of your left hand to that of your right, and no farther.

I've been forced to leave this bubble, to navigate this world alone once again. Open my mouth wider and blossom like a dandelion. Every discomfort is a chance for transformation.

I’ve recently noticed a lot of dissonance between my head and my heart. My mother has always said I am aware of my feelings and their strength, and I'm trying my best to lean into them - all of the pain and the comfort and the swelling of the pipes of my heart. At the end of the day, pleasure and pain are the same, and I am trying my best to care for all of these feelings I'm carrying around. I know that this is the way things have to be, that leaving this bubble and not breaking my fingers clutching onto this relationship will be good for me. But god, how my heart isn't ready. Time is passing by slowly and perhaps I've had too much time to think lately. I find I always give myself to things fully, and I worry I've attached myself too hard, that the recentering of myself -- just me, not the me that was the us -- is harder than I expected. I don't have many words for you. But I have segments of sentences, and maybe some pictures too to show how I have navigated the time in my bubble and the subsequent hatching of this chrysalis. I can't expect you to understand, but I hope you find some value in it.

From my Notes:

• We can be sad later but we have dinner to go to.

• They are just little boys with big words stuck in their mouths.

• Maybe we'll only ever be grateful for each other. Maybe that's enough.

• Every touch I convince myself is your hand.

• If he thinks so then I think so.

• Everything grows back.

• Sleeping in.

• I usually just sit in my room.

From My Camera Roll. These are a work in progress:

21 May 2023

There are times I miss him so bad but can't quite remember what it is I miss. What his body feels like up against mine or the pattern hiding in the color of his eyes. What attributes made us the same. These unknowns do not erase the pit at the bottom of my throat, so I suppose I am grateful for them still. I honor them, I give them their space to breathe. I don't try too hard to understand them, at least not yet. I still don't think I've had enough time to explain my feelings with any ounce of eloquence. I hope this will do for now. I owe it to myself, and as do you, to believe that things happen for a reason, that you are protected, that the universe is guiding you to the exact place you are supposed to be in this life. That what is meant to return will return, and we can have gratitude for everything, even those things that don't quite make it back to us. I accept everything with gratitude, or at least I'm doing my very best. I hope some of this makes sense. But I am just a girl in love.