The Romance of Healing
A short essay by Libby Driscoll
TW: SA, themes of trauma
As I published my previous piece, The Romance of Unhealthy Love in the Twenties, I shut my laptop like a huge wooden door. Prying closed the rusty old lock I believed that I was breaking up with break-ups, kissing romantic love goodbye and choosing a better way of life for myself.
Though I stood stubborn and proud on my make-shift podium, after a while my pride’s mask began to slip. Shaking, but safe, a whimpering creature slowly crawled through my veins and spread like a fever.
Becoming more acquainted, the creature and I would rendezvous in dreams and the fate that had spread through my flesh would begin to reveal its true form. The image would fade in consciousness and denial at first, but I was beginning to learn that pride could be a trickster. Silently watching late-night reruns of unfaithfulness hand in hand, the trickster that flooded my veins settled into itself and showed its true form.
The mask fully dissolved in the safety of solitude, I now knew fear when I saw it. Cradling an old friend in my arms, the rattling flesh eventually held still as I accepted its ugly presence. Gasping for air in damp mountains of cotton I knew love wasn’t responsible for my isolation. I never feared love. I had grown to fear man.
As a believer in fate, ‘If it’s meant to be, it will be!’, was scratched all over my flesh mocking my faith. The questioning hands clutching my skull shook my head and mixed my sexuality, my past and my future into a cocktail of stomach bile trying to escape my body. Maybe I never liked it? Maybe I never wanted it? Maybe no one actually enjoys it? The bladed questions tailored an ill-fitting suit of asexuality, and whilst I was covered for a while, I still knew that underneath I was bare as I had been left.
The grey areas of commitment had turned black, and in the darkness, you can make out the cold lonely truth. Reality stabs your waist as they once did and peels you layer by layer as you surrender to ‘it wasn’t your fault’, triggering a mourning period for a body that still moves. For a body that is tarnished. A body that still breathes and craves to be loved. Living uncalibrated in a dented vessel breeds an exhaustion deeper than the depths of where the evil came and you find yourself trapped in a hall of mirrors. Bound to mental and physical echoes, how am I expected to live when a statistic claws at the glass instead of my own reflection?
I hated it. I hated it and would cover the mirrors, batting with shards of glass that would eventually defeat my futile armour of pseudo-sexuality. Stripped to reveal the child inside, I’m reduced to nothing more than the same old naked core. Tiny and alone again in a forest of shameful regret, the emptiness of bare trees stare down at a crooked frame that mimics them. Feeling as dense and as stiff as the forest, the wind of women who stood before me whispered, ‘They’ve died before and we lived again.’ Life, death, life.
At the latter end of death’s cycle, my flesh began to heal as the sun became eager to rise earlier each day. The women and trees stretch and grasp the sun in explosions of pink, white and green, and as the sun kissed their lips I reached too - I want to love! I want to be loved! God please just let me love!
As I surrendered to healing, I grew taller and allowed the light to pour in. The love I wanted to give was gushing out of my throat, oozing from my hands and dripping through my fingers with nowhere to go. Overflowing and slipping on my words I tried to direct my love, I don't know where. I reached for the stems of supermarket carnations, cigarettes and foaming sea waves, which looked at me and smiled, knowing I existed the same way as I believed them to.
I stood up straight above the mess and a rosy haze began to fill the world once again. It’s not until the slipping stops that you can see everything you’ve touched can become a component of love, if you let it. My friends are roses because they’re true love to me. The sunrise is art because I decided it would be. The cinnamon in my coffee is magic and will protect me. The words I write each day are a part of me, and I am greater than I’ve ever been.
After a forceful rebirth into a pink little world, you are left with no choice other than to accept the love you’re so eager to give. After screaming that I was too tired to learn again, the universe gently took my hand and guided me to the right place at the right time where I instantly recognised my fate. The ruins of ill-informed love began to shake and slowly crumble as my instinct wanted to cower and weep at the hand that told me for the first time it would be alright.
This is the reason I will change my mind. This is all I want to dream about.
Waiting for a chance to be proved right again, instead, I learned my sharp blade of selfishness was never anything more than for show, and it dissolved in the tears of being heard and being held. I’m lucky to have found a reason to change my mind, and I cry now because I have more than carnations. I have a garden overflowing with vines comprised of poetry, sprouting with morning kisses and blooming in tangled fingers at night. Nested in the calm I know I have never before experienced a romantic love so strong that it extends itself back to me and allows me to love myself too.
With the air in my lungs the same as the air around me, I’m grateful to be presently back in my body, and once again in love with love. How wonderful it is, to know that there’s nothing in our nature we must change to experience it for real.