sacred seasons
solitude vs. loneliness, 47-year-old-me as my sage, being careful with yearning, and savoring singlehood.
1. I love to be alone but a particular kind of alone. Maggie Nelson sums it up perfectly in Bluets: “I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”
2. My aloneness gets finicky during my cycle and even after 180+ periods, it still takes me by surprise every goddamn month. This is when I need to be alone and if you infringe on my aloneness at this time I will rip your hand off that opened my door but I also want you to just be here with me but I also can’t fucking stand hearing you turn your book page and hearing you inhale so deeply so please leave actually. (I love you). If you were to ever ask me if I was about to get my period because of my mood, my adult self would appreciate you understanding the ways of my cycle (if it was kindly noted) but my feral self would filet you no matter how it was noted, maybe because of the time in middle school when my best friend was yelling at this douche boy in class and he, throwing The intentional dagger (as boys would do then), said to her, “Jesus Christ, are you on your period?” His shins were kicked as a result.
3. And then, as a woman does after 7 days, we stop bleeding and life is full of possibilities and let’s go out and sit in the village green and smile at people walking past. I surrender to it now but the sheer awe that I can be (and am) 4 different people every month never goes away.
4. It’s early luteal now so I squeak out a hello upon being surprised by two cute waiters sitting outside the front of the restaurant. I’m shy but I’m curious and I’ve been growing out of the old story of me being shy by remembering that I’m more curious than I am shy and that I can choose to lean into the former now. I notice the small red hearts on each of their black t-shirts and gently curse through my gritted but smiling teeth. It was my last night on Bainbridge after two soul-fulfilling weeks in the PNW and I was (questionably) ready for overcoming what felt like the last frontier, the final boss level: solo dinner on Valentine’s day.
5. It is a rite of passage to I’m not sure what but it is an unavoidable confrontation of the self. There’s no hiding from your cruel thoughts when you are sandwiched between two couples on the yearly anniversary of love. Valentine’s makes couples blink red and pink in a way that they don’t on any other day of the year. I’m not sure what color I blink, maybe green? Like the open parking spots in a tech-savvy parking lot to signify that hello, hi! Yes, I am in fact open to love! But the thing is, until I move to the place I want to live (which is not where I currently am) for the unforeseeable future, my green light will blink until you excitedly come around the corner only to realize there’s a bright orange cone sitting on the far back corner which confuses you and yet you know you could move it if you got out of your car but for whatever reason, you don’t.
6. In my plumpness, I observe random people and (in my mind) pose the hypothetical situation: Would we fall in love if we were both stuck together on a deserted island? Why this comes across my mind at least weekly, I do not know. Maybe because as I was forming a core part of my identity in high school I was also watching Lost, or because survivalist daydreaming connects to something primal in us that isn’t satisfied in our current developed world, or because I believe our ‘type’ is really just what our ego thinks is best for us and our soul has a completely different agenda and the surprising, unlikely island lover might be exactly what our soul needs this time around. Would the recognition of our love be after we had to huddle for body warmth one night? Or would it be as we crossed the 93rd hashmark on our stone calendar and saw the physical representation of all those times we’d been there for one another? (My glorification of this situation is to be noted and ignored because we’re just playing here.) Would our love last once we were rescued and back in society or would it crumble? Could we find love again or would no lover ever be able to understand us like our survivor counterpart could? If you ever see me at a cafe, this is probably what I’m thinking about. A bit odd but also open to possibilities and filled to the brim with harmless romanticism.
7. In my hollowness, a monotonous, icy, and lazy whisper slithers through my mind: Another Valentine’s alone. The thought has always been familiar: a common rom-com trope ingrained into me as a child and carried along to my adulthood. But familiar doesn’t necessarily mean less painful, just like how even if something is common, it doesn’t make it okay. The bodily reactions that exude from the whisper have not changed: my cheeks get hot, my forehead vein starts popping out, I look down at my book/journal and look up only when I need to with my curls creating a curtain to hold in all my shame and my shoulders hunching a little more as if I’m trying to protect my mushy, aching, romantic, love-yearning, lonely-ass, big heart.
8. Fucking fuck. I just want to enjoy dinner and this thought has exhausted me since my first crush on Aaron Carter and it felt like this year, this Valentine’s day, was the final straw. I don’t know where the gusto came from but I think the gods heard because in something which felt like divine intervention, my eyes shifted to my jacket hanging on the chair before me and I saw a flicker of my partner sitting there smiling at me and then back to my jacket and my books and my tiny legal pad. They were both here now, timelines having collapsed on top of each other. There was no difference between the seat’s contents. It was all the same.
9. And then suddenly I was 47 and I was reminiscing on this moment. I saw me/her, sitting at a pizza restaurant on Bainbridge, a young, single maiden on a deep journey towards herself, in a year of crazy beautiful changes and dramatic inner shifts, actually attempting to follow her dreams for the first time, falling in love with a new state she will soon move to, with oysters and a Margherita pizza all to herself as she hummed mmmm with her eyes closed after the first bite. This was not the place nor time for hot cheeks or embarrassment. It was a place for worship and reverence.
10. And so I discovered the sacred formula to use when Now doesn’t feel like enough:
Pretend to be the significantly older version of yourself (at least 20+ years).
Observe your younger self at your current age.
Take note of all that you reminisce on so fondly, the things that bring tears to your eyes.
Cherish it as you remember you will miss it one day, in fact, you miss it right now.
Be pleasantly surprised when you open your eyes and remember, omg, I still have it right now!
Start worshipping it all NOW.
Let the tears roll as you realize you are in love with your life, exactly as it is.
11. Because what a shame it would be to only realize the sacredness of something once it’s gone.
12. I am tired of wishing it all away. I am tired of getting lost in my yearning. I am tired of cozying up to my desires instead of my current life. I am here to get intimate with where I am right now. To desire is a privilege that I am grateful for, but I am no longer interested in getting lost in the sauce that is longing. It is sneakily sinister if you don’t keep it in check by pairing longing with actual actions towards said desire, for it will keep you stuck in the fantastical daydreams that your brain can spin up and momentarily soothe you with until one day you realize those daydreams are still living in the clouds and you’ve made zero progress towards them. It is beautiful to connect to your deepest desires by feeling what they will feel like in your body, but if not acted upon, they can become crutches for escaping your current reality.
13. Why are we wishing for summer when it is winter? Why are we neglecting the present and worshipping the hypothetical future but when the future actually gets to us we don’t worship it because it has become a present moment yet again and that is never enough?
14. It drives me nuts when Los Angelenos bitch and moan about the rain because 1) It is cliché and overdone, and 2) it only rains an average of 36 days a year in LA (which feels generous honestly) and how are we not seeing this event that happens for less than 10% of each year as sacred?
15. But also it is 75 in the middle of February and I am supposed to be wintering. I crave a kinship with the land I live on where mother nature (more obviously) mirrors my internal experience. Where my environment sees me and witnesses me in my own seasons as it experiences its own. Where the naked branches say, hey, don’t you worry, look at me, we’re the same and we’re not to be rushed, we’re meant to be barren and gray right now, that’s the vibe, the lush will come as it always does.
16. You may say, look closer, winter is here! But I grew up with a magnifying glass in my pocket, whipping it out to fight the transplants that would say LA doesn’t have seasons. I was the one that would yell, but look here! And point to the jacaranda blooms and the Santa Ana winds and the May gray/June gloom that burns off at 1pm and the juicy-pink winter sunsets and the lower angle of the sun and the extra dewy mornings at the start of the school year and that specific smell of summer-break morning air that tells you it’s gonna be a hot day today. I know the ways of the zoom in because I have had to. I love that about me but I now find myself ready for a new way, ready for the dramatic seasons, the more obvious passings of time with bright red leaves and lush green and rain––oooooo so much more rain!
17. But it’s not just time yet and I know that. We are SO so close but there’s still some unfinished business and my body knows that. So I pull out my trusty magnifying glass again and I peer through her and I see that:
18. There will come a time when I worship sitting across from my lover as we cheers an oyster. When I worship raw intimacy, compromise, and making large decisions together. Spooning, forehead kisses, and morning sex. But it is not summer yet and I will not get lost in my yearning to be sun-kissed. It is late winter, early spring in LA and I am marveling at my creamy, pale skin and the newly discovered freckles against their now stark backdrop. I am worshipping the solo dinners ordering whatever I please. I am worshipping the abundant hours of solitude where I am not perceived by another. The pleasure of cherishing my own body before anyone else does. The emotional freedom of not needing to explain my decisions to anyone except myself. The radical independence of breezing through new museum exhibitions because they don’t call to me and taking an hour in the permanent collection that I’ve seen 100 times. The doing what I want when I want.
19. I am savoring the delicacy that is my singlehood.
Love,
Kristen 🦪 💌 💝