"Manzana" he would call me. That was the nick-name he would call me in private. No one knew that I was his "apple" - that name was ours. It belongs in a private treasure chest where all the countless moments we shared alone belong. Falling in love creates those indestructible chests which are filled with private memories, with manzanas. We carry the chests when we think of those that we have loved. The more moments shared, the heavier the chests. And as we set forth on days when we are no longer near those whom we have loved, the chests lay resting amongst the troves of all of our other life experiences. Manzana is in there and it will always be there because I can't forget how hearing it made me feel. Now, to some, it may sound weird to call someone you love an apple but it wasn't what he called me that mattered, it was how he said it. He said it in moments when we were happy. And we were happy.
I never thought that this moment in my journey would come. The moment where I was actually "okay" again. The moment where I could authentically feel at peace with the loss of my relationship with a man I loved so dearly. I went through the stages of any loss and in the thick of it, I swore there was no way I could climb out of the sadness I felt. I went through my bouts of maddening anger, exhausting attempts to bargain or plea for a different outcome, waves of drowning sadness, and moments where thinking of manzanas were, in essence, intolerable. Crying, over-rationalizing, hypothesizing, replaying old memories, blaming, avoiding, denying, wanting, missing...I felt it all and far too intensely. The man I had spent one-fifth of my life with was no longer a part of my everyday experience. No longer there to curl next to during cold nights or during Jack Nicholson's portrayal in The Shining. No longer available to call when I felt lost with how to deal with relatives at Thanksgiving or when I just wanted to blab with my best friend. Everything slipped away and it felt as if a part of me was rotting away into thin air.
I told other people that I couldn't love again and wouldn't love again. That I didn't have it in me to hold another person in the same light which I had held the man who gave me manzanas. No one understood the rule I had set up for myself. The rule was that you only love once and you do it whole heartedly, no matter what the shape of the relationship is or how wrong a fit it may be. And I was sticking to it. For a long time, unbeknownst to my ex, I was sticking to this rule in hopes that something would change. That the days of manzanas would return. That we could be happy again or begin again with a fresh start. When I recognized that I only had one tattered chest for my ex, I felt the deepest sense of hurt and disappointment. For awhile, my heart rested heavy on all of the negative memories we shared. All the parts in my treasure chest that resembled unwanted pests or litter. And as I moped around, grey in the face and in what looked like a six month phase of endless pajamas, I would hear older women tell me to try to "think of the good times". I remember feeling that these women and that the rest of the world who had choired the same message were delusional.
I felt that other people must not have really loved deeply if they could move-on so quickly or if they could tell me to follow suit. Or that they were just people who threw words of love around without grasping the full meaning. Needless to say, I got to a point where I was way too much in my head and not in my heart enough. In a way, I liked it. I had always been all heart and little head. I was all about loving the other, sometimes to my own detriment, and I did not focus on surrounding myself with people who encouraged me to be myself, flawed and all. I believe I got into my head because my heart - breaking as it was - could not handle any more attention. A part of me that wanted to survive the loss knew that I had to step away from the pain in my heart and the nausea that raced through my body. But in this realization, I also recognized that I had not been authentic in the relationship. I stashed parts of myself away and ignored other parts in an attempt to please my ex but it did not please him. He would tell me that he loved me and wanted me to think about myself. In essence, I did not show him that I knew how to love myself and without that, I could never really fully be available to him. And that's when it hit me. All of the pain that I endured with my ex, all the pain I endured after, all of it...I was partially responsible. Getting into my head for once finally allowed me the vantage point to see how my treasure chest had been infected by a lack of two young souls not knowing how to communicate their needs and their hopes. We were both doing the best with what we knew.
I felt thwarted by my experience of losing a best friend, a person I loved so dearly and whose treasure chest I valued so much. But beyond the waves of confusion and remorse that followed my big crash of 2007, I know now that the experience served a purpose. I can't speak for my ex but for myself, it awoke me to the parts of myself that I had neglected in my relationship with him. It helped me recognize that love does not equate with forgetting about oneself and that to truly love another person, a person has to be able to first love themselves because only then is the person truly available to be there for the other person.
After many a rocky-road (and this is referring to my emotional ups and downs during the grieving process and to the emergency pint of ice cream for occasions when marshmallows and chocolate are in strict order), I am now able to look back and smile upon the memory of my ex. I no longer flood my mind with memories of ways in which I was hurt by his actions. I look at him as I look at myself when we were together: two young people in love who were trying to cope with not knowing how to navigate and balance our needs with the other persons needs and who were doing the best we knew how to do. We were not perfect, we were not always filled with rays of sunshine and butterflies, but for moments in time we shared happiness and love for one another. And because I was blessed with the experience of falling in love, I have a treasure chest in my heart and soul that I can go to when I need a warm manzana memory. That in itself is the gift of having had the chance to really love someone, because even if I can't experience those moments of love with him again, I know that in a way they can never be lost.