p.s. will you marry me?

Swallowed-up house: Not the sink hole in Florida

In Florida two weeks ago, a sink hole opened up and swallowed a guy and his entire room. For days or years, water had secretly eaten away at the last fingers of limestone supporting the cement slab of his house, and beneath his bed that night, the delicate lattice finally collapsed. In an instant and without any warning, he was sucked stories underground, never to see daylight again.

Sure, it would be melodramatic to compare how I feel right now to the sensation of falling into an unseen chasm and being swallowed by the earth. Especially since I only met the man in question less than a week before when he said he couldn’t have a relationship with me. It even sounds absurd to me when I say it in my head, much less admit it aloud to friends or fess up here. Worse because this was my no-dating March and I only made it to March 7 on that pledge.

The melodrama seems unjustified and heartless, too, when I think about how I walked out on my marriage and made my ex feel. A year later he is just finding solid ground again.

And yet.

We say “falling for” someone, perhaps because even the good part is like the firm earth disappearing from under your feet. The sensation of free fall: like some of your organs are dropping faster than the rest of your body so that your heart slams up against your ribcage and your stomach presses downward. You tumble weightless and hope–no, already believe–the other person is about to catch you.

Then, when it’s over, you find yourself waiting for the hard earth to meet you somewhere below.

As he told me why he was not ready to be involved, a strange thing was happening to me. I curled up in my chair, the phone overheating on my the side of my face, and felt the emotional pain as almost entirely physical; I could observe it coursing through my body. First I noticed cold encircling me, prickling down my arms and legs, followed immediately by a heaviness in my chest.

As I listened to his explanation, I followed the sensations with a kind of surprise and curiosity. I thought to myself, I can feel my diaphragm clenching, but still, I am surprisingly okay. Then I hung up and felt anything but okay. I called friends, but before they called back I found myself checking on the dating sites again. (And was busted by someone interested, noting that I’d been online, but that’s another story.)

I think what happens with such painful emotions is that you feel horrible, like you’re not going to make it through the day, and then out of nowhere, for a moment, you feel okay. The pressure behind the eyes, in the throat, chest, and belly easing for a moment so that a full breath comes in, and with it, a wave of calm. It’s fleeting at first. In the beginning there are a lot more minutes of wondering how you can go on like this than minutes of optimism and feeling like your old self. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the ratio reverses.

It was like this (more intense, of course, and longer) when my mom died. Even years later I have periods of overwhelming grief over losing her. But now there are long stretches of not-grief.

Considering guys I’ve fallen for in the past, for the ones who mattered, I can still feel an emotional stirring, but surrounding those feelings are not stabs of pain or regret or rejection or other negatives. I can’t honestly say whether it was emotional work, or time, or moving on to other relationships that made me stop thinking of them so much and created healing. Maybe all of the above.

All I know for sure is that I am taking at least the rest of March, maybe longer, away from dating. Time to really start working on my relationship with myself. One move on this front already: I changed the tagline of this blog to focus away from dating and changed the About page as well.