this is happening.

I keep repeating the words, over and over, to myself: this is happening. It is my effort to stay focused on the present, to not get too caught up in the weeping tide that might consume me if I let it. They are words to remind me, too, to look up, to breathe, to close my eyes and turn my face toward the sun that is right now shining.

A little more than a year ago I cut off much of my hair. It was a symbolic gesture meant to mark my grief and what was then, I thought, the beginning of a difficult transition. I had expected the intervening year to look quite different. The particular departure I'd been expecting never materialized, but the grief it represented was quite real, and I've continued to keep my hair the same relative length during this passage of time, in part, because I was still grieving, still, actually, actively being wounded. I decided a while ago that I didn't want the relationship I was symbolically gesturing toward to be marked by grief. There has, it seems, in the last several years, been enough things, lives, relationships, moments, that have been marked by grief.

I am ready for joy.

These past few months, I have been trying to do things differently. I have been trying to let go with love. I have been trying to gain clarity, of purpose, of vision, of intent. I have been trying to be present with my wounds without actively engaging their wounding. I have been trying to live my life from a place that is more open, more loving, more dedicated than ever to what I've discovered in my own heart, not in spite of the grief, but through it, because of it. These losses have been lessons, but so too have been those moments of joy, and I have been trying not to minimize their significance.

Today, my dear friend and lover of the past four years, begins to walk a new path that no longer corresponds with mine. We each take our first steps into this next leg of our journey. I have no idea whether we will ever find our way back to each other, or what it might look like, how that might manifest, even if we do. I think the next nine months or so will involve a lot of internal reflection, a lot of digging deep. I don't know how that will feel or what I will turn up.

What I do know is this: my love has never been stronger. Even knowing that I cannot engage it in the ways I have hoped for in the past, even with the lovely RMH making his exit from the state and from this part of my life, does nothing to diminish it. I wish him more love and sweetness and success, more abundance and possibility and joy, more fiercely than I have ever before. And that's saying quite a lot, because I have always been coming from a place of love when it comes to him.

And so this day has arrived. This is what the end looks like, and the beginning. This is happening. This is really very presently happening.