The First Days of Solitude

I am returning to a place I’ve known with new eyes. Something I asked for, but I didn’t expect this to be the crime scene I’d be surveying. I’m still making sense of what exactly happened to me in the last two years. Often, I’ve felt like Alice falling down a rabbit hole. I’ve been lost. In love, but completely undone, and not in a good way.

Now, I am free, but not yet found.

It’s almost incomprehensible to me that I neglected my own needs for as long as I did. I am starting to see a pattern, one that’s hard to admit to myself, let alone out here in public.

What I am coming around to is recognizing what I can’t do next time, the boys not yet men who are wrong for me. Not because they don’t have a world of potential, but because I am ready to be with someone who doesn’t need a hand.

When I was in college, I remember talking with a very good friend and telling her that I wanted to find a man who wants me, not needs me. What happened to that girl?

Beautiful New York, in its overwhelming, disorienting splendor can certainly take some credit. When I arrived here, I thought I knew everything. Well, almost everything. I quickly (in a matter of days, not years) realized that I knew a lot about a little and needed to learn a lot more.

In the haze of fresh insecurity, I pursued, in some cases, and gave in, in others, to three consecutive and (too) serious relationships. I am only now, minus a handful of months between each, coming up for air on my own.

Five years later and finally alone in New York, I have figured out the professional labyrinth, a source of satisfaction and security that I am especially thankful for right now, but need to return to looking inward.

I am sure I will not like everything I see and that is certainly a part of what’s led me to search hungrily for distraction, but if not now when? This is my time.