I'm So Happy to Be This Sad.
My partner left today. For a long time.
272 days.
An entire backpacking season.
Dozens of haircuts, sicknesses, dinner times, epic farts.
The end and beginning of school years.
Inches of children grown.
No planning that trip next month or the spur of the moment late night dessert date.
There are youtube channels I only consume with her. There are board games I only play with her.
The belonging I feel with her. Her warmth. Her smell. Her laugh. Her love.
There are thousands of things I’ll miss just because she’s somewhere else.
It makes me deeply sad to see what I’ll miss out on, but fuck, I’m so grateful to have so much to miss.
One of my big takeaways from therapy can be summed up like this:
Realize you have feelings.
Now feel them.
Then enjoy feeling them.
Finally, let yourself enjoy the ones you didn’t think you could.
We’ve known she would be leaving for over a year. I knew these feelings were coming. Because of therapy and the self-work I’ve done, I decided to let them come and see what it was like.
The good-bye is by far the hardest part. It’s such an intense feeling to have someone in your arms and know they have to leave and be gone for so long. It feels weird to care so much about 10 more seconds of a hug or wish I could store up the feeling of her skin.
I tried to feel what it felt like. I’ll try to explain the sensations.
My eyeballs feel like they are the plugs at the bottom of the ocean. The sadness is the immense water pressure pushing tears around my eyeballs and soaking my face and neck.
My lungs switch from being used to breathe to… something else. Sob, express raw sadness and anger.
My gut wants to groan or yell or scream or say something.
The sobbing makes me tired and numb, but she’s leaving in just a few moments so I don’t want to be numb and I dive back in to the feelings.
It hurt so much, but this time the message was a little different. “The more it hurts the luckier you are.” I’m really happy to get to be this sad.
P.S. That feeling I was getting from my gut wanting to express itself had been building, but I didn’t know what to do for it. It was anger and sadness mixed. That part of me felt raw—animalistic—so I tried to yell and scream into a pillow, but it wasn’t what it needed and felt unsatisfying. Later, I tried letting it speak and it just wanted to shout “No” over and over with a “fuck” thrown in occasionally. It felt really young and stubborn and finally satisfied with that.
