I Don't Want to Disappear Anymore

There is a smell to an airport bar that I know better than I’d like to admit. Warm beer gone stale. The ghost of everyone who sat on this stool before me, going somewhere, leaving something behind. In front of me the bottles are lined up like a congregation . Cheap wine, Tito’s, every shade of tequila, the Bud Light taps sweating under the fluorescent lights. A game is on the television that nobody is watching. Behind me, the particular hum of people in motion.

I am drinking a Diet Coke.

And here is what a year ago I may not have believed. I have no interest in disappearing anymore. I want to stay.

Even though a few minutes ago I got up and left Greg and his kids at the gate. His four children, who are becoming, slowly and without any guarantee, mine to love. I made sure everyone had their tickets, helped steer everyone through security, guided us to our departure location, and knew I needed a moment. I said I’d be back. I walked to this bar by myself and sat down in the noise.

A year ago that walk would have been an escape. It would have ended with something amber in a glass and a softness spreading through my chest that I mistook for peace. Tonight it is a Diet Coke and ten minutes of my own company, and I know the difference now. I know what my nervous system is asking for before it has to raise its voice. I know how to give her that. I know how to take care of her, because I finally learned what she needs.

I have always loved airports.

Most people don’t. They arrive braced, claustrophobic, already annoyed. But I love the aliveness of a place where no one is asleep. Everyone here is awake in a way we rarely let ourselves be. Everyone is going toward something they can picture and something they can’t. A reunion. A funeral. A first day. A last chance.

What’s wild is that we hand ourselves over to a vessel we did not build and cannot fly, and we trust, with no evidence, that it will carry us to the other side of the sky.

I find that somewhat crazy but also beautiful. All of us in motion. All of us trusting. All of us going somewhere we have not yet been.

It’s this time of year again. The trees go heavy and the light turns gold in the late afternoon and somewhere overhead a door opens that the ancient Egyptians tracked and the mystics still honor. The Lionsgate portal. A window, they say, for calling in the version of yourself you were built to become. For dissolving the parts that no longer serve the person you are trying to be.

You see, it was almost exactly a year ago when I sat down inside that window and asked myself a question I had been avoiding for a very long time: What is the block? What is the thing standing between me and the life I can feel but cannot reach?

I journaled for two weeks. Heavy, and hard, and clarifying. And at the bottom of all of it was an answer I always knew was there but hadn’t been ready to resolve. It was the drink. It had been the drink for a while.

Letting it go was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I’d love to tell you it felt like freedom. Mostly, at first, it felt like loss. Like grieving a friend who had also been quietly robbing me for years.

But something in the stars, or in my energy, or in whatever it is that conspires on our behalf when we finally get honest, held the door open long enough for me to walk through it. The year anniversary is close enough now to touch.

Even then, in the worst of it, the question I kept asking was not only about me. It never has been. It was: what do I do with this once I have it?

There is a ring on my finger now.

If you missed it the proposal happened last month in Mexico, and when I said yes I meant it. A full body ‘this is my person, here is my partner’ YES.

But there’s a certain kind of arithmetic that comes after the yes.

Because here is the truth about being chosen at midlife. You are not only choosing him. You are choosing everyone he loves. Most of you know I raised my own two children already. I gave them the long years, the ordinary hours, the whole of my twenties, thirties and forties. In many ways, I anticipated a chapter that was finally going to be mine.

Instead, I am navigating the love I have for four people who did not come from me, and hoping, in the quiet way you hope for something you cannot control, that they are learning to love me back the same.

I will tell you what no one tells you, or what they tell you and you don’t understand until you are standing in it. It is a lot. Not in a way I resent at all. In a way that is honest. Loving this many people takes an exorbitant amount of energy, and at this point in my life that energy is not infinite, and so it has become a negotiation. Every single day I decide again how much of myself to give.

Some days I am all in. I have more than enough and I pour it out and it feels like the truest thing I have ever done.

And some days I sit at a bar by myself and wonder if it is selfish to want to give less.