My mom sent me a video link by one of the speakers from The Secret about using the law of attraction to attract your perfect mate, how to understand it in the context of wanting someone back. I’ll watch it. I have no doubt it will communicate to me you can’t use the law of attraction to lure them back to you, to manipulate them into loving you, which I already knew. And tell me in one way or another he’s not coming back, which will hurt yet again. But at least I can say this. I’m not afraid of the pain.
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All along I’ve known I wasn’t afraid of losing him if God willed it. I loved God more. But I sure as hell was afraid of the pain that would inevitably follow. Oh, yeah. So that’s one good thing about wading chest-deep in the waters of grief and anger and pain – a little more pain won’t matter much. Just a raindrop in the flooded sea. You never feel the fortieth lash as keenly as you do the first. It’s the dreadful beginning you have to endure to get to the rhythm of the agony, you have to give the electrical current sizzling your skin right off a chance to settle into a steady hum over your body. I’m already on the rack; what’s another stretch?
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I’m sorry, truly sorry, for the wasted legacy of my choice to let it all go and have no more tries at this. And it’s not just my legacy which is tragic enough of a waste, though right now, that legacy doesn’t look like much, all chewed-up and frayed; it’s my parents’ legacy that is determined by my choice. I’ve gone through that sorrow before – understanding that they deserve for me to be married and a mother as much as I. This is not a recent revelation. But I don’t feel the full weight of guilt I always felt before. I have the conviction now of experience to know what I am doing and what I am losing by doing it. Or not doing it, as it were. But you have to understand, I don’t have any more of me to give.
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With just one man marked on my path, I am cocooned by pain, regret, foolishness, and anger. I am constantly reminded of what I thought I had and what some other woman actually has now. I can’t escape. I wish every time I see a Nissan Xterra that every one of them throughout the world would spontaneously combust and leave me in peace with no more reminders of him. I am captive, in bondage, curled up in my cramped cage of inward-aiming spikes of memories. An astonishing, obscene number of songs, films, TV shows, places, foods, you name it, has been sprayed with his scent. So you see, I quite literally can’t invite someone else in to leave his mark. I’d have nothing left. No refuges, no places to go from the pain. I can’t risk it not working, and quite frankly, someone else would just remind me of him more forcefully – someone who wouldn’t be as tall as he was, whose voice isn’t as rich as his was, whose hands aren’t quite so warm. No. No.
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The fairy tales are bullshit. Men aren’t heroes, and they don’t rescue us. Nor can we rescue them. There will be no rescue for me, except what God sends. And don’t get me wrong – there’s a certain quality to a rescue, an action by God that is epic, incomparable, moving. But I know how I came alive with the other one. The wonder with which I saw I wasn’t broken after all, that I worked just as I ought. And now I am quiet again, quiet all the way through. No one tells you that a kiss isn’t a fool-proof panacea for a narcoleptic princess. Sleeping Beauty can fall asleep again. So it’s hard for me to believe that God would be everything to me like he would for someone he called to singlehood when I so clearly am brought to life by romance. Earthly romance.
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So I will be rescued from this dead life by God and be grateful and still be discontented. Because they don’t make men like that anymore. If they ever did. They don’t notice or care about a sleeping girl, and the only hint that they are not following their design is a vague restlessness, a distant regret at their own nebulous failure. There’s no one to teach them to be men, to be heroes, anyway. They see a beautiful woman and they think they’d be a hero for her, but when faced with risk or masturbation, what do you think they choose? John Eldredge had the ailment right, but I can’t believe his cure.
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There is no hero to sweep me away. And I probably would not let him anyway because I am closing the door and going to bed.
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Those men. They’re so pleasant or organized or kind or goal-oriented, so good to their mothers and sisters, so reliable to their friends. And let’s face it – the “ man’s man,” the heroes, would probably just be brash and arrogant and annoy the hell out of me. They make me so angry, those men, all of them, but how can you not feel compassion for them? A towering, pointless compassion for their plight? They know they are not what they want to be, feel the same frustration about that that I do, and they just walk steadily through their days, doing nothing about it because they can’t. Poor babies. All those passive men who are better at running than fighting, and better at fighting than fighting for anything good or beautiful or worthy. They mill about and don’t notice all the tired women around them who are giving up the battle they’ve been waging alone and going to bed. All those Sleeping Beauties and their baby-faced, beardless princes lost in the brambles.
