Soft Skin
The shower-softened tips of my fingers massage moisturizer circularly along the contours of my face; my eyes are closed and steam hangs in the air with the white noise of the bathroom fan and wraps around my naked body in a static fuzz. My fingers are running along the ridge of my brow, up and down the bump of my nose, sweeping the hammocks of my undereyes. I am silent in this midnight ceremony, the autopilot of self-care. Each measured exhalation sends a rhythmic, minty chill of fluoride across the tip of my tongue from freshly brushing my teeth.
I am visiting family in London, Ontario (AKA “serial killer suburbia”) for the weekend for a double celebration of my younger sister’s birthday and Father’s Day with our uncle. I visit here a few times each year, the last time being at Christmas 6 months ago, where at the time, my ex-partner of 7 years and I were each visiting our respective families in different cities.
We were amicably preparing for the end of our relationship, having made the decision to be “together” intentionally until our planned mutual move out in mid-January, a pre-mortem of sorts to a warm and love-filled relationship; in the same way that we had built our life together, we were consciously laying our relationship in this romantic form to rest together.
It was a very strange, morose period, us calling each other as we had for many holidays over the years, recounting what we were both up to, the gifts that we received, spilling the scoop on family drama that came up, telling each other that we loved each other before we hung up the phone. We even talked about the heartbreak and sadness that was coming up for us both knowing that this was the “last Christmas.” It was a grievous holiday to say the least. In moments sitting on the edge of the bed in the guest bedroom alone – the same bed I was sleeping in now, months later – I remember tsunamis of sobs wracking my body. The loss was unprecedented, and juxtaposed overwhelmingly with the intense appreciation for all that I had had an opportunity to share in this life with my soon-to-be ex-partner, a conscious, visceral loss.
It's June now, and the trees bordering my uncle’s home are explosively lush; a stark contrast to the black ice-slicked roads and barren trees toothpicked around the neighborhood back at Christmas. It is here in this white tiled bathroom in solitude on a summer midnight in suburban London, Ontario, that I have one of many similarly tinted moments that I have experienced during these last 6 months: The grief rises in me and rinses through my body; I feel it branch languidly across my chest, cascading across my shoulders and upper back like shrink wrap. My brows fight the undertow of furrowing like purse strings; my tear ducts surrender. I am awash in it all. It is not just purely grief, it is the fathomless appreciation for all that I have in my life, coupled with the awareness of how intensely fleeting it all is.
In this bathroom, I am thinking about the warm sounds of muffled talking downstairs from my sisters, my uncle and his partner. My older sister has pointed out a number of times over the last couple of years how intensely sacred this period of life is: we are together, all safe and healthy, and in the peace and contentment of each other’s company.
I know this will all change, family is getting older, my uncle who is approaching 70 is talking about his diabetes a lot this visit; my mother, also nearing 70, has a tumour on her thyroid that will be excised soon; my older sister just turned 40 (albeit annoyingly looks 28); my younger sister just got her first “big girl job” and will be moving to the city this year. Life is constantly – necessarily – in movement, incredibly, heart-wrenchingly, unpredictably, and overwhelmingly; every moment of any of this *waving hands gesturally in circles* is beyond sacred.
I think about the many moments my ex-partner and I felt this way late last year during the months leading up to the official move-out in January, where we absorbed and jointly mourned the form of love that we had shared with each other for so many years, it was a devastating and intense exercise of presence, knowing that the loss was inevitable, but holding all that we could with each other as if our bodies and hearts were cameras, capturing every millisecond of our life together, of love, of touch. In the presence, in the capturing of gratitude, we got to say good bye to the 7-year chapter of our lives together, a gift of closure that meant we were both able to leave this phase of life knowing wholly what we meant to each other, without question.
Sacred. This is all sacred.
London is one of a handful of Canadian cities, along with the Kawartha Lakes, Montreal and Halifax, that has offered itself almost as a distant family member in my life, a place I visit intermittently, know familiarly and feel affectionately toward, and acts as a sort of locational temperature check that demands to know how I have been since the last visit. Who have I become? What have I felt? What is it that I want now? What has evolved in the space between now and the last time I was here?
I have been in this bathroom, rubbed moisturizer into these same cheeks, slept in the bed on the other side of the wall behind me, many times over the years. I am a different version of myself each visit, the time in between whittling me into someone new. The grief in me now feels different than the grief in me at Christmas on the edge of the bed. Maybe it is the difference between anticipatory grief and the grief of healing. The grief after the acceptance of what I have lost. My body, my heart, they feel bruised, the acuteness of the wound of the end of that relationship dilating into something all-encompassing – not necessarily fading away per se, but now spread out across a wider surface area. Sometimes I can forget the pain is there, sinking into the every day of my life, but then I remember a certain thing, see something that reminds me of a particularly poignant memory, and the pain viscerally radiates through me, crippling me for moments to hours to days depending on the sharpness.
Heartbreak, loss, grief – the physicality of these experiences cannot be understated. They are held in the body, expressed by the body. In the last so many months, I have noticed that I have become better at surrendering to it, the desire to fight it now gone, and in its place, a comically, eye-rollingly stoic (borderline Buddhist?) mindset has morphed:
I cannot do anything about the way I feel but submit to its experience, accept what demands to be felt by my heart and my body, and trust that I am enough of who I am that I will guide myself through it.
And “through” is a big open empty box of a word – through this there is just more life and the everything of everything that it offers, its grief, joy, love, heartache. I think of the constellation of emotions I will feel across the nights of my life, spreading moisturizer into aging cheeks and crow’s feet in bathrooms in cities that remind me of what I once felt, who I once loved, who I have lost.
I suppose I am not entitled to peace simply because I have known pain, none of us are. There will be grief after this grief, but also love after the love I have lost. Maybe what I desire for myself is the capacity to accept this life and my experience of it for all of what it is and what it will be, to not feel a need to actively get through anything but to hold space for whatever I am currently experiencing with groundedness, kindness.
Love.