Fragmented

A reflection on how we compartmentalize ourselves in an effort to be witnessed and what it means feel whole.

It’s been nearly a month since Barcelona welcomed me with heavy arms. It wrapped me in its viscid embrace and left residue on me like an adhesive that has kept me glued to whatever soft and cool surface I can find. In front of the recirculated air twirled between fan blades, I’ve spent hours trying to detangle the mess of thoughts that had accumulated in the nearly six weeks I spent in California. 

It started in a Toyota Tacoma. I sat beside someone I hadn’t expected to see again,  now with a silver streak running through his strawberry hair – a testament to the years passed since we’d been in the same room. I’d spent the evening recounting my adventures and telling him about my life abroad.  And momentarily, the fact that he had shattered my heart to pieces receded to the back of my mind. To be fair, it was a fragile little thing when he met me. It hung by a string that winter, like a shimmering glass ornament susceptible to the slightest bit of pressure. 

Many months after our parting, he took up excessive space in my mind. The unanswered questions gnawed at me. Was the connection I had perceived real? Had he felt it, too? But that was many moons ago. In the years since, other men have flowed through my life, each like a resin that seeped inside the breaks where they filled some cracks and created new ones. I see now, with hindsight, that he wasn’t responsible for the shattered bits; I was already hollow when he showed up. Yet, despite my fragility, I still felt whole back then.

“I was just a hatchling when I met you,” I told him over my glass of Gamay.  I was fresh out of a separation from the only partner I had ever known when he showed up in my life. From the first night we met, I felt a prickle in my stomach that I didn’t recognize. The feelings were foreign, and like everything that had felt out of reach until that year, I chased them with ferocity.

In the years since then, I’ve learned to dampen those firey sensations in the pit of my belly, but when he showed up in my dream a few weeks before my flight to California, the memory of the prickle awakened. So when, at the end of the night, in the yellow glow of his truck’s headlights, we saw a deer cross the street in a neighborhood where it did not belong, I knew there was a reason I’d found myself beside him. 

When I contacted him, I had no idea what I was hoping for. I wasn’t convinced that he would be any different. I knew I risked falling back into his hot and cold trap. Over the weeks that I was in California, I saw him five times, and it wasn’t until the last night that we spent together watching him with squinted eyes through the speckled luminosity of a candle in an obnoxiously dark restaurant that all the pieces started to fit together.

We fell into one of those conversations, like the ones I remember having late into the night the winter we met. We would sit on the stoop of my fourplex, cigarettes warming us from the inside out, our words mixed together effortlessly and painted a shared view of the world.  In that shadowy corner of the restaurant, I remembered why he held space in my mind for so long after his departure. Despite being only dimly lit by a tea candle, I felt like I was being witnessed through clear eyes for the first time I could remember in years. 

There I was, sitting across from one of the first people who chiseled away the protective layers I had been hiding behind for decades. I felt naked, and because I had no expectation that our reencounter would be sustained beyond my visit, the vulnerability came naturally. I found myself telling him something I had been thinking about for some time but hadn’t bothered articulating to anyone, probably because I didn’t expect anyone to understand. 

Fragmented is the word that comes up repeatedly, although I don’t think I used it that night. There are so many versions of me, I told him. The woman I was before I met him..before I divorced, and the one I grew into in the months that followed in California. The person I’m slowly being molded into in Europe. And my shadow, the one who makes its appearance among my family and those who dig deep enough to see it. Each with a common view of the world, one he always seemed to understand.

I have tried, with varying degrees of success, to show up as my whole self to the people in my life. Many refused or failed to see the complete picture. I find myself choosing which fragment of myself is acceptable in every version of my life. When I left my ex-husband, my friend once told me that I had been muting myself – dimming the light that radiates from that fire inside so as not to outshine those I held close.

I didn’t feel like I was holding back my light that evening with him. The filtration system by which I usually operate had been disabled without my acknowledgment, and I spoke candidly and without fear of rejection. I suppose that could be because he had already rejected me. I had nothing to lose. When we left the soft glow of the restaurant, the energy shifted, and we found ourselves in the familiar discomfort of reality. But this time, when he receded, I found the courage to ask the questions that had laid dormant for so long. I told him how he’d hurt me. 

We didn’t see each other again. Maybe I had, once again, shone too much. 

That night, I woke from another vivid dream. I felt dizzy with thoughts and revelations. I thought back to my most recent ex. – the one who could never really see me. 

It was a few nights before I moved, and I had given up on the possibility of staying together. We lay in bed together under the moon that lit up his loft through the skylight above us. We stayed up for hours talking about every date we had had and every fight that subsequently followed. Before we fell asleep, I told him, with my head on his chest, in defeat and disappointment, that it had been one of my favorite nights we had spent together. When he asked me why, I told him it was the only time I ever felt like he had truly seen me. He had been so infatuated with a woman who didn’t exist. He painted me into a picture in his mind that fit into his version of reality. For the first time, under the glow of a nearly full moon, he lived in mine long enough to see what had actually been there all along.

Just like we choose to show up as fragments of ourselves, the people in our lives choose which parts of us they want to see. Our full spherical shape, with its scars and imperfections, doesn’t always fit into the frame. I think back to a purer version of myself, unscathed, light, and fragile. There are moments when I envy her naivety because heartbreak –whether inflicted by a lover, a friend, or yourself – is the gift of learning what you need to feel whole, all while realizing there is no one presently able to give it to you.

So, we continue compartmentalizing ourselves into palatable pieces, wondering if there will ever be someone to satiate the hollowness inside. In my case, I leave them like breadcrumbs scattered across oceans and continents, almost ensuring I never feel whole again. It’s as if I’m scared that the full weight of me is more than any one person or place can bear. 

When the day broke that Saturday after dinner, I was still awake. I watched the endless navy night morph into the dusty gray the sun fought through. I escaped north to the forests and rivers that have healed me time and time again, and when I curved around a bend in a light-dappled two-lane road just before arriving at a campground, I saw another deer. But unlike the doe that stared into the truck wide-eyed and disoriented, this one moved gracefully among the trees where it belonged.

In the weeks since I returned to Spain, I have been in that familiar place, trapped in a languid body with a manic mind. I have spent hours writing and erasing strings of words that fail to capture the ethos of the thoughts that keep me awake. 

I sought relief from the sun's insufferable rays and my mind’s circling thoughts at my favorite park that overlooks the city and the sea. I tried to let the chatter from nearby tourists and families fade into the background in search of a moment of peace. There, I read a passage by Briana Wiest that read, “Because your numbness isn’t feeling nothing, it’s feeling everything, and never having learned to process anything at all. Numbness is not nothing, neutral is nothing. Numbness is feeling everything all at once.”¹

I’ve been feeling everything all at once, which I’ve resented at moments because it feels like this numbness and everythingness has overshadowed so much of the joy I have found in the last few years. It’s when I stop fighting against what I genuinely feel and stop hiding behind the borders I’ve erected between the fragments of myself that I can begin to show up whole again.

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Tarot Card of the Moment: XXI THE WORLD

To encounter the World in your cards is to encounter a great unity and wholeness. It symbolizes the moment when the inner and the outer worlds - self and other - become a single entity. In some traditions, this state is described as enlightenment, or nirvana. There is a recognition that the individual self is profoundly linked with all other things, and that we all dance and sway along the flow of life to one rhythm. Not only do you hear this rhythm, but you participate in it - following the dips and the rises, the joys and the sorrows. 

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Currently Listening to…

1. 101 essays that will change the way you think, Brianna Wiest