Pain is a window

A sentence I overheard

“Pain is a window that lets the light shine in to show you where and how to love”

The last time I killed myself it was because a you wouldn’t get back together with me. I was twenty one. It was my birthday, and it felt fitting that I shared it with you, drinking Abita purple haze. The same thing we drank when we were seventeen in New Orleans volunteering together after hurricane Katrina, at a bar our new friends took us to, that they knew wouldn’t card.

You gave me a domino you found on the muddy floor of a broken house. It had a one on either side of the line.

I drilled a hole and made it into a symbol of our love. It would take me ten years to realize you meant you didn’t feel together. To realize that you wanted something I couldn’t give you because I wasn’t comfortable with myself. To realize you wanted something I couldn’t give you because you weren’t comfortable with yourself.

Now fifteen years later we are both married to beautiful women and I am so grateful I let go of the ideas of love that took my life away from me.

Now we look over each other in little messages and pictures. Comforting glimpses.

I killed myself because you said forever and I thought that if we weren’t together that was a lie.

It’s so obvious now. We will love each other forever.

The distance and shape of our relationship changed.

Abita wasn’t doing us any favors.

Because our real love wasn’t us trying to find something in each other that wasn’t there. It was a firm belief that love we made

Has made the world we love.

It took three months of staring at the ceiling and writing on the walls to realize that love is not trying to make someone into someone they are not. Realizing in my bones that love was the curiosity that had stopped and that all my “knowing” was an act against it. Seeing that love ceases in my heart when I don’t want to know more.

I’ve since learned curiosity is a muscle.

In that moment of giving up I wanted things back how they were. Back how I wanted us to be. Back how they never really were and how they could never really be.

You didn’t get back together with me on my birthday but you did drink and laugh and kiss me and tell me the truth.

That you were still figuring yourself out and that this wasn’t it, and that you loved me. I couldn’t hear that last part after the first. That would take me fifteen years to hear.

I told you I could handle whatever you needed to say. And now it’s a gift that has made life so much lighter, yet in that moment it was a weight too heavy to bare.

Six months before, my mom saw I was drifting and encouraged me to try some origami.

I folded many things, and I started to fold cranes. I decided that I could give each one character, that I could tour the infinite through this. I gave them to people on the train and left little messages hidden in their folded wings around the city. I learned to fold them with both hands at the same time, in my pockets, at concerts.

And then I heard if you folded a thousand you could get a wish.

I only wanted one thing. For us to be back together. For us to go back to high school before jobs and life and death and everything. For us to be back on my roof in the middle of the night kissing in the rain.

It was such a big ask and it kept getting bigger in my head. I knew I had to do more than fold them.

I wrote on each of the papers something I loved about you. It still wasn’t enough. You had broken up with me four times by now. And it had been over for a while. I knew If I wanted the impossible I needed to touch the impossible.

So in less than one full day, I folded 1000 cranes, each one a love note.

I was down to less than a minute per crane.

This state of mind. The endless frenzy, was no stranger to me. What I might call mania now was love for me then. It was and is a firm belief that I can do anything. That I can start now and not stop until I see something through.

And those cranes bought me three more weeks with you. The wish came true.

I try to look lovingly on that younger version of me. So willing to make a valiant effort.

It will take him a long time to become something that resembles dependable. It will take him a long time to care more about the thousand things he doesn’t know yet.

It will take him a long time to see that the ability to keep going despite pain and hunger and hurt is both beautiful and tragic, that it was not only love that drove me but also self hatred and fear. That if I take care of this man he will learn a new way to take care of himself and trust others.

It will take him a long time to realize all the pain and loss of all the stories he can create about all the things that have happened to him…

It will take him a long time to know that sometimes love is sitting and listening. That sometimes it’s what’s not written on the cranes.

That sometimes it’s finding my way back to

I can’t wait to meet who you’re becoming.

And that all that pain is not something to run away from but something to hold tenderly while I remember that

“Pain is a window that lets the light shine in to show you where and how to love”