Idle Hours

🎵 Listening to: Starlings – Elbow ¹

“Maybe I’m aromantic or something,” I mumbled, trying to locate when and why the passion had left my body, and if it had ever really been there at all.

“Sam,” my ex said, the surprise and disbelief flickering in her voice. “You’re the most romantic person I’ve ever met.”

At some point during my last long term relationship, I stopped believing in love. The kind that makes cheesy radio songs feel eloquent. The kind that makes all the edges in the world seem softer, warmer. The kind that draws you out of yourself — forces you to be braver, sweeter, more alive.

The thing about being a romantic is that, when you cut yourself off from love, you lose parts of yourself.

A few years ago, all the points scattered, and I lost the shape of me entirely.

You can chalk it up to chronic illness (something, something, survival mode), the grief of a partnership ending (in slow motion, when two puzzle pieces warp until they aren’t recognizable to each other anymore), or my refusal to emotionally confront the worst phone call of my life (when my best friend and first love called to tell me he had incurable brain cancer).

But it’s easier and more truthful to say that I was afraid — I was scared all of the time — and my life began to bend to the shape of everything I feared.

From 2020 to 2024, there’s a single digit number that represents how many times I actually left my house. And they were to move, to see doctors, and to say goodbye to Sean for the last time.

I convinced myself that I was keeping my sick body safe.

But when I almost died last year, I realized everything I had done to protect myself — the estrangement from my family, the agoraphobia, the refusal to date or let anyone touch me, the withdrawal from everything that made me feel alive and soft and human — had not actually protected me at all.

It only starved me.

A year ago, I was teetering on the edge of septic shock due to a gallbladder rupture that, despite eight desperate 911 calls and three emergency room visits, had been dismissed. And oddly enough, it became the best thing to ever happen to me.

When I knew I was dying, my heart let me know in no uncertain terms that I had been so terribly mistaken.

I went from wanting nothing to wanting everything.

I wanted to hug my mom, and kiss someone at a bar, and climb a tree, and learn to do standup comedy. In my delirium, I remarked more than once to friends, “I would’ve been a really good husband.” And my god, I missed dancing, I missed breathing the same air as strangers, and I missed staring out of a train window.

I thought about how, in trying so hard to be good and safe and subdued, I’d missed the point. I hadn’t made nearly enough mistakes. I hadn’t written enough poems and I hadn’t had enough sloppy, tender, intimate sex.

I hadn’t given myself the chance to live wholeheartedly, to lean all the way into life and sink my teeth into it.

Suddenly I wanted everything, all at once, all the time. Something had set my soul on fire.

It took six agonizing months to finally get emergency surgery.

It’s still something of a mystery that my body held on all that time.

My dad says that I survived because I was determined to. A shaman told me that this ordeal was the universe returning me to my “natural state.” A doctor said my body managed to wall off the infection, an unlikely but extraordinary feat. Some friends credit my audacity, others say I must be cosmically lucky. My therapist says it was an awakening, a dark night of the soul, and a medium told me Sean stayed close.

I’ve arrived at, “I just couldn’t possibly be done.”

Almost losing my life reminded me of just how much I loved it. And grieving Sean reminded me of the version of myself he called forward by loving me with so much conviction. Through music, poetry, and late night instant messages, I fell in love with life — and with him — under impossible circumstances.

Last night, I was talking aloud to Sean, as I often do when I’m alone.

“There’s a parallel universe,” I told him, “Where neither of us got so sick, and instead, we got married. And I’d write poems about you, and you’d read them while I made us dinner, and—”

It’s always a little sweet when I cry. I was so emotionally blocked and tired before this past year that my ex once bought me a book for my birthday about the merits of crying. As if she saw this overthinking, brain-tangled, weary and stoic wreck, and thought she could persuade him to tears if he just understood the beauty of them.

Now, in the privacy of my studio, the tears come so easily, like Sean is drawing them out of me. I was a deep well that ran dry, suddenly restored just by the memory of how he used to sigh so happily in my ear.

I keep thinking about how my tears are watering this garden, this season of my life where I am so much softer, so much more alive, so much more reckless.

And in that moment when I let myself say aloud what I wanted — this fantasy of Sean holding a manuscript I’ve dedicated to him, of me bringing salted water to a boil, the intimacy of what it could have been — I knew that it wasn’t just about what we had, but the fact of my aliveness, and what might come later.

I think I believe in love again.

I think I want love again.

Not now, exactly, and not in the way where I chase it or engineer it in some clever and hungry way.

Just that I’m willing to be encountered, to not hide, to let myself be revealed fully and be loved at my most intimate and raw edges.

And it’s not something so concrete, where I’ve already written the story and I’m simply waiting to cast someone. I’m not auditioning someone for a preexisting role.

Part of wanting is not knowing that you’ll ever have it.

But I want the kind of love that I think I had with Sean, where the light can’t help but be pulled forward. The kind of love that changes the way you see the world, where you’re witnessed in ways that take all of the loose threads — of heartbreak, of worry, of calamity — and pulls them tight again.

The kind of love that calls on you to be brave and to let it change you. Not to be less of yourself, but more of who you are.

And in that alchemy, devotion isn’t extraction or enmeshment. It’s more like music, a song you love to sing and that you can’t help but sing. Where there’s an art to loving someone well, to being so good to them that the softest parts are less like bruises, signs of looming expiration, and more like sweetness waiting to be tasted again, and again, and again.

I’ve deleted the dating apps. The encounter is part of the magic, and I want the magic again, I want all of it again.

And I’ve pulled the volumes of poetry that Sean sent me over the years off the shelves, cradling them like a promise.

I’m not searching, but I’m hoping, and I think that means I’m alive again.

—

(1). Sean sent me this song when we were in high school. It’s extraordinary — like, truly so beautiful and cinematic in ways that rewired my teenaged brain — and when I was dying, I listened to it on repeat and wore essential oils perfumed with oranges just to entice his ghost.