i am standing up in the waves

My ex sent me a video on Instagram of a cartoon brain and heart in a boat. In the video, the boat was filled with water. The brain was using a bucket to bail water out, and the heart was using a bucket to pull water in. The heart whips out a captains hat, proud of his sinking ship. "You dude" his message to me says, with three laughing crying emojis.

He thinks this proves how well he knows me, how unbothered he is. That he sees me, like he has promised so many times, that if only I were not so troubled, so problematic, we could be together. And he's not entirely wrong about one thing. My heart and my brain have been at odds for most of my life, making most decisions tense and painful and confusing. It doesn't take a masters degree in psychology or years of time with me to know that. I'm willing to admit this and more to a stranger in the dry goods aisle of Trader Joe's. And I'll be honest, my heart sometimes still bails water into the boat (though at this point it's not using a bucket, more like a styrofoam Popeye's cup it saw bobbing by). I do this thing with men, I've realized, where I latch onto a version of them that I see as tender, sweet. Oftentimes it is a younger them, an image in my mind created from the stories they have told me about their childhood and tender moments as young boys. I hold this image in my heart, and examine it when I feel angry or upset or doubtful, and it makes it very difficult to keep a tight grip on my own needs going unmet.

The irony is that if he really saw me, if he really understood my heart and my mind, then we wouldn't be in the situation we are now. He thinks it is because our lives have been so vastly opposite, that I can't reconcile our differences in politics or upbringing. In some ways, he's also right about that. It is simply in the way that all those things boil down to the very cellular makeup of our two selves, comprised of every moment we've had on this earth and all the lives before it. It is in the way he talks to me, and maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with me, but when words mean the world to one person and carry no weight for another, neither one of you can ever understand the other.

I have fairy princess energy, bubbly like the glitter sparkles in a champagne drink (Crystal the Oracle told me this, so I know it to be true). I deserve to be enveloped. I have a tender, sensitive heart. If you must mock and question it to distance yourself from your own pain, then I will let you. I know who I am. I am standing up in the waves. I will laugh each time you misunderstand me, gleeful in the freedom of no longer needing that approval.

If there is anything I have learned, it is the depths I will go to love and be loved. And I will apologize for so much, but never that.

I am a proud captain going down with her ship, overflowing with heart.