This is a story about two people that met and fell in love. But they did not live happily ever after.
Birdy met her man at the start of summer. After scores and scores of online dates, a Musician messaged Birdy online. They met at a bar one warm summer night. They had drinks, they talked, and they looked into each other's eyes and they felt something between them. It was a spark, but it was also more than a spark. When I talked to Birdy she said on that first night when she met the Musician and he looked at her it made her knees feel weak. They started to spend time together. They played cards on his deck, they went dancing, they went to farmer's markets and they did all the things that feel so good when you are with someone you feel so naturally and effortlessly at home with. Like the season in which they met, their love felt light, warm, airy and radiant - the best goddamned feeling in the world. Birdy was falling for the Musician and falling hard.
As summer days grew shorter and the air became a little colder, so did their relationship. The hard angles of their relationship became harder and harder to ignore. The Musician pulled away. He was busy, he was distracted, he was there, but he was not there. Birdy hurt. Birdy hurt because she didn't understand how something so good and wonderful could stop. How? Why? Why we ask ourselves when things we love stop working. But there is often silence in return.
Birdy said good-bye to the Musician. She couldn't be with someone that was there, but not there. She couldn't love someone and not feel loved back.
And so the days passed.
She spent time with friends and family and as is often the case when we lose someone we love deeply we become shadows of ourselves. We are there, but also not there. We live in the past, in the moments that have seared themselves on our hearts and etched themselves into our brains. We trace our fingers through the grooves of our memories. Over and over. Over and over. And it hurts. It hurts, but in some way that pain is preferable to the emptiness of feeling the loss of that person that we had loved so much.
A part of us breaks. But of course we move on. Time is patient and it waits for our heart to feel a little less sad each day, even if it's just by a drop. The memories that our brain protects so fiercely begin to dull. The string between our heart and brain, wrapped around a broken relationship, begins to lose its tension. Slowly, it grows flaccid. The reservoir of our sorrow, once so deep it drowned us, begins to shallow out. If we're lucky, Connection with another helps coax us forward. A gentle coo, a warm look, a conversation that pricks part of our heart that we had forgotten about and left for dead and rotten... they all pull us forward to hopefully be open to loving again. Are we the same as before? We're not. That's just how it is.
Birdy has been hard on herself these last few weeks and months. She doesn't want to feel the hurt that she feels. She's judging herself and her heart and feels contempt for its weakness. Her poor, fragile, broken heart - it doesn't want this either. So she must love it. She must love her heart and the pain it feels and give it the time and space to grieve.
Birdy will get through this.