A Dainty First Awakening
….. I’m in a school uniform and as I look around me I see that there are others dressed the same. I must be at a school, but from the impression I get it is a high school, so I am in my teenage years. At one point the girls have been playing a sport (perhaps hockey) and we’re t the change rooms, about to leave, when someone’s bag gets swiped out of her hands. The thief runs very fast and we don’t see which direction he/she has gone in. My friend and I run, catching a glimpse of the thief in the distance. The thief doesn’t see us, thinking that we’ve given up, and so slows down to walking pace, chatting to some other pedestrians traveling in the same direction. We sprint to catch up, but unfortunately get seen before we can get close enough and the chase resumes once again. The thief is heading for the busstop, an area that we are not familiar with. I get the sense that we’re not going to make it in time…..
I’m walking down some stairs, painfully self-conscious of having to walk past all these people, others scholars, like myself, but they are from older grades. I hate feeling like this, I want to disappear every time I have to walk past them, particularly past him. (I remember him, even though here, in this place and time, we’ve not yet met, but I know him, and I feel him staring at me, aware of my movements all the time.) I had to fetch something though, and had no choice but to use those stairs to get there. I make my way back down to the very bottom of the cement grand-stand, and take my seat in the front row, alongside my newly acquired boyfriend, Gert. (Pause. BOYFRIEND? HIM? I never would have dated him in my wildest years! He was the joker of the class! He was my friend, but never anything more than that!?! Resume.) I slip my hand into his and it seems we’re very close. Both hands are clasped round the others. It seems there is a comfortable sense of being able to be intimately close – strange for this age and all the self-consciousness that goes with it, as well as the fact that it appears we’ve only just started dating…. We’re lying on a couch and he starts to kiss me. I am taken aback for only a moment (Pause. He is KISSING me! Uuuggh!...Hold on, he’s not bad at this, he’s actually darn good. Resume) before I allow myself to swept up by the tingling sensations starting to course through my body. He is a very talented kisser, especially for his age. I tease him back. A playful exchange of gently intimate tongue-wrestling ensues. I look him in the eyes to see what his intentions may be and I find a sense of peace there, I am safe……
I wake up. That was weird. Why would I be dreaming of Gert? I take a breath and allow myself to allow the dreaming mists to go I their own time. It’s always best to do it this way, especially when wanting to remember and better understand a dream. I have to remember this one, it seems significant somehow. I get up, rinse my eyes, make a cup of coffee, and mention to my mother in passing that I have started dreaming again, and am having the nicest yet weirdest dreams. She says it’s probably my medication starting to work, a good thing. I haven’t been remembering having dreamt for months now – the depression was probably too severe and I was not sleeping properly. I take my coffee back upstairs, excitedly anticipating the warmth of my feather duvet around me. The weather is cloudy and it’s the perfect atmosphere to stay in bed (but I will have to get up to finish my last-minute-rush Christmas shopping.) I take a few sips, savouring the flavour – I am a coffee connoisseur, and an addict (something I have only openly admitted to of late.) And now the wandering starts. Why the dream? A week or so ago I remember dreaming of my ex-boyfriend that I started dating after I left this particular high school. I knew when I woke up that I was subconciously resolving unresolved issues. We had been discussing this particular character in my teenage life in my session with the psychologist. So it made sense that a few days, or nights, later my mind would start re-filing. But there seemed to be nothing that may have triggered off this most recent re-filing escapade. Or was there?
I think for a moment, and the pieces suddenly illuminate and fall into place. I have been trying to work through a very recent and tumultuous break-up. Part of which is the letting go of the person and all the feelings that go with that person – being angry at him, missing him, reminiscing about how he was, and even who he was (although this last part always seems to be the most biased, and I’m afraid to say is not as accurate as we seem to think, our imaginations have a way of creeping in and changing all the hues somehow.) I can feel a resistance inside, there something I’m not admitting to myself. I think of Owain, of how we broke up in high school. I really liked him a lot, but why does he still flit through my mind at the most unlikely moments? After all these years. I am now twenty-seven. I was thirteen when we met, and he was three years older than me. Again, I think of the break-up, I resolved myself to the fact that it was peer-pressure, as I never did get a straight answer from him, actually, we never spoke about it – hang on, we did. It was via a telephone call I made to him during the holidays. I asked him what was going on, and he couldn’t really tell me. It seemed strange that having only been away for a week to veldschool he could have lost his caring feelings toward me. The conclusion I came to was that his friends whispered words into his ear, they got the better of him, I wasn’t cool enough and wasn’t prepared to go far enough sexually with him. He allowed himself a moment of weakness, and let others opinions matter more. I needed to have a reason and this was the only reasonable and logical one I could think of.
He had pursued me so determinedly, for so long, anything else just didn’t make sense…..what grounded this more, was the how aware he was of me the following year. I could sense he had never forgotten me, his heart was still very much mine, but he didn’t have the courage to face himself. Instead he found himself another girlfriend with blonde hair and blues eyes, who, like me, did well academically. (This is not the first time this has happened, and so I am acutely aware of human nature and its manner of trying to resolve yet deny the unspoken of the heart.) …. I don’t think about these last parts, however, they’ve only just come up now as I’m typing. What I flash back to how he sought me out after school whilst I was rehearsing for our school operetta. Or he’d be lurking round the boarding school gates and if I had the courage to venture outside (remember I was painfully self-conscious and didn’t ever feel popular) I’d always find him somewhere, dawdling around, having some excuse to still be at school, or I’d find him at athletics practice, he was a long-distance runner – a potential professional.
I flash back to how he asked my friend if he should ask me to be his girlfriend, and when it happened he had a flower to hand me. I remember the stairs we sat on when he did this, and I remember how I didn’t have a cooking-clue how to deal with this kind of situation! But I said yes, a definite yes, no matter how shy I was. I really like him….and suddenly the penny drops, he was my high school sweetheart, and I loved him dearly. I loved him, and he broke my heart. I have never admitted to myself the depths to which he had crept into my heart, as young and naïve as I was. He meant something to me, more than all the others, and I was devastated. But the biggest realization that I’ve had this morning, and what my dream was trying to tell me, is that he was the love of my life. And perhaps, I have spent all these years searching for him in others, I don’t know. But that bit about his “being the love of my life” released a gasp and a sigh all at once right through me. I had no idea. And I think in some strange way I have really missed him for all these years….
When I started dating the much older guy after Owain, it was a way to boost my ego, I see that now. It was possibly one of the worst decisions I have ever made, but I made it none the less and have had to deal with the horrendous emotional consequences. Having dreamed of this older guy a week or so back, was a blessing, my mind’s way of filtering back to this moment, with Owain. It had to sift through all the trash to uncover the treasure. Amazing how after a meaningful moment, followed by intense hurt, we cover it up with as much meaningless stuff as we can – the image I have is of a trash can, where the meaningful treasure lies at the very bottom, and all the vegetable peels, bits of soggy paper, and empty cans and cartons fill it to the top – its no wonder it takes so much time to sift through back to the bottom. After time the trash starts to stick together and mutate into other ghastly things. Alright, enough of that gruesome picture. How intelligent our minds are, to know that part of our healing is having to retrace our steps back to the beginning – the point of deep feelings of love and rejection. I felt terribly rejected when he came back from veldschool and tried t hide away from me. I suppose he couldn’t face me out of guilt, shame.
When I left the school a year later, I wrote him a letter. He had plucked up the courage to speak to me once during the year, catching me completely by surprise. He had moved into boarding school by then and for some reason had managed to seat himself in the dining hall facing me from an angle, just enough for either of us to make eye contact, or surreptitiously observe the other with longing feelings. I sensed him staring at me all the time, and would verify this with my friends. I wondered why he didn’t have the courage to be open about it. But he didn’t. I had started receiving letter from the older still-to-become boyfriend, as he was living in another town, and whenever Owain was near, I’d make a very loud hoo-ha about them. In retrospect this was terribly childish and I’m sure did not ease his feelings, if anything it’s probably the reason why he never made another attempt to ask me out again. (I didn’t think of that. That was really stupid of me, wasn’t it? Gosh, I’m such an idiot – or rather, was an idiot.) I left the school at the end of the second year of being there, and before I left I knew I needed to make some attempt at closure. I wrote him a letter, and told him that despite what had happened, it had been an honour to have him in my life, if just for a small while. Now that I think of it, I held back a lot and probably should have said that I had never stopped thinking of him. Then again, it was still a big thing to do as I had done it. He answered back with a letter. I knew he still thought of me. From a very young age I have been very aware of people’s behaviour with an ability to see past the pretenses of actions, through to the truth inside. (Of course, this doesn’t always work for the observed, especially when it’s a young child making the observations and uncovering what’s really going on.) It doesn’t make it any easier however, especially when I was (and apparently still am) trying to make sense of myself…..I sense I am losing the plot of this story. Need to re-focus. What I’d like to say in ending, and what I will need to take in gently through the day, is the re-surfacing of a love that still yields great tenderness. And an opportunity for me to accept with honesty, feelings that I threw away and covered up so quickly, that weren’t ready to be discarded. Lastly, a chance to be okay with myself and what I felt, that I was not a fool, as I was left thinking. I was anything but. I was brave. I faced his popularity with courage, I faced his delinquent friends too. I never stooped to their ways of doing things and I never got caught up in his celebrity-like status. I stayed as me. Shy, self-conscious, heart-of-strength, truthful me. I had the courage to offer my kind of love to him, it was undecorated and dainty, and it was enough that I gave it that way.
I think, now, I can finally find peace with myself and move on. Assured in the knowledge that what I offered was of the most precious kind. I see now that for years I have questioned the validity of my love, when it should never have been questioned. After that relationship I tried to “fix” my loving manner, and in the process went against my nature, my self-worth, and my values. The parts of me that I had held firm to my heart, and really stood my ground for up until then, throughout my young life. All of my mistakes in relationships and the kinds of relationships I got into thereafter, I see now, stemmed from there. I left that moment believing that my love was inadequate, and if my love was inadequate then I was inadequate. I have, as a result, spent years trying to cover this up, conceal it from the rest of the world, especially my lovers. How terrible, if anyone knew the truth, that my love carried no worth. But Life has given me a chance - I have been or have taken myself back to the point where I questioned myself, and my love.
Goodness, I’m getting tears in my eyes, It was just last night in a moment of self-doubt that I asked my mother if perhaps I had missed something in my giving, in this last relationship I’ve just recently left. If perhaps there was something wrong in my loving. If perhaps I was blinded to a flaw in how I love another. I went to bed desperately asking my Beloved Lady these same questions, begging Her for answers ….. and this morning, what I have written above, is the answer. Moments like this move me so very deeply. My search back to that tender and innocent part of me, where I know myself to be young and in awe of the mystery of life, excited by the prospects of discovering it through adventures, I think I’ve touched on it again. Or at least have recognized it in the distance, after all this time, and I am excited, because it’s Christmas, and inside, it’s the Christmas of my Soul.
(20 December 2007)
….. I’m in a school uniform and as I look around me I see that there are others dressed the same. I must be at a school, but from the impression I get it is a high school, so I am in my teenage years. At one point the girls have been playing a sport (perhaps hockey) and we’re t the change rooms, about to leave, when someone’s bag gets swiped out of her hands. The thief runs very fast and we don’t see which direction he/she has gone in. My friend and I run, catching a glimpse of the thief in the distance. The thief doesn’t see us, thinking that we’ve given up, and so slows down to walking pace, chatting to some other pedestrians traveling in the same direction. We sprint to catch up, but unfortunately get seen before we can get close enough and the chase resumes once again. The thief is heading for the busstop, an area that we are not familiar with. I get the sense that we’re not going to make it in time…..
I’m walking down some stairs, painfully self-conscious of having to walk past all these people, others scholars, like myself, but they are from older grades. I hate feeling like this, I want to disappear every time I have to walk past them, particularly past him. (I remember him, even though here, in this place and time, we’ve not yet met, but I know him, and I feel him staring at me, aware of my movements all the time.) I had to fetch something though, and had no choice but to use those stairs to get there. I make my way back down to the very bottom of the cement grand-stand, and take my seat in the front row, alongside my newly acquired boyfriend, Gert. (Pause. BOYFRIEND? HIM? I never would have dated him in my wildest years! He was the joker of the class! He was my friend, but never anything more than that!?! Resume.) I slip my hand into his and it seems we’re very close. Both hands are clasped round the others. It seems there is a comfortable sense of being able to be intimately close – strange for this age and all the self-consciousness that goes with it, as well as the fact that it appears we’ve only just started dating…. We’re lying on a couch and he starts to kiss me. I am taken aback for only a moment (Pause. He is KISSING me! Uuuggh!...Hold on, he’s not bad at this, he’s actually darn good. Resume) before I allow myself to swept up by the tingling sensations starting to course through my body. He is a very talented kisser, especially for his age. I tease him back. A playful exchange of gently intimate tongue-wrestling ensues. I look him in the eyes to see what his intentions may be and I find a sense of peace there, I am safe……
I wake up. That was weird. Why would I be dreaming of Gert? I take a breath and allow myself to allow the dreaming mists to go I their own time. It’s always best to do it this way, especially when wanting to remember and better understand a dream. I have to remember this one, it seems significant somehow. I get up, rinse my eyes, make a cup of coffee, and mention to my mother in passing that I have started dreaming again, and am having the nicest yet weirdest dreams. She says it’s probably my medication starting to work, a good thing. I haven’t been remembering having dreamt for months now – the depression was probably too severe and I was not sleeping properly. I take my coffee back upstairs, excitedly anticipating the warmth of my feather duvet around me. The weather is cloudy and it’s the perfect atmosphere to stay in bed (but I will have to get up to finish my last-minute-rush Christmas shopping.) I take a few sips, savouring the flavour – I am a coffee connoisseur, and an addict (something I have only openly admitted to of late.) And now the wandering starts. Why the dream? A week or so ago I remember dreaming of my ex-boyfriend that I started dating after I left this particular high school. I knew when I woke up that I was subconciously resolving unresolved issues. We had been discussing this particular character in my teenage life in my session with the psychologist. So it made sense that a few days, or nights, later my mind would start re-filing. But there seemed to be nothing that may have triggered off this most recent re-filing escapade. Or was there?
I think for a moment, and the pieces suddenly illuminate and fall into place. I have been trying to work through a very recent and tumultuous break-up. Part of which is the letting go of the person and all the feelings that go with that person – being angry at him, missing him, reminiscing about how he was, and even who he was (although this last part always seems to be the most biased, and I’m afraid to say is not as accurate as we seem to think, our imaginations have a way of creeping in and changing all the hues somehow.) I can feel a resistance inside, there something I’m not admitting to myself. I think of Owain, of how we broke up in high school. I really liked him a lot, but why does he still flit through my mind at the most unlikely moments? After all these years. I am now twenty-seven. I was thirteen when we met, and he was three years older than me. Again, I think of the break-up, I resolved myself to the fact that it was peer-pressure, as I never did get a straight answer from him, actually, we never spoke about it – hang on, we did. It was via a telephone call I made to him during the holidays. I asked him what was going on, and he couldn’t really tell me. It seemed strange that having only been away for a week to veldschool he could have lost his caring feelings toward me. The conclusion I came to was that his friends whispered words into his ear, they got the better of him, I wasn’t cool enough and wasn’t prepared to go far enough sexually with him. He allowed himself a moment of weakness, and let others opinions matter more. I needed to have a reason and this was the only reasonable and logical one I could think of.
He had pursued me so determinedly, for so long, anything else just didn’t make sense…..what grounded this more, was the how aware he was of me the following year. I could sense he had never forgotten me, his heart was still very much mine, but he didn’t have the courage to face himself. Instead he found himself another girlfriend with blonde hair and blues eyes, who, like me, did well academically. (This is not the first time this has happened, and so I am acutely aware of human nature and its manner of trying to resolve yet deny the unspoken of the heart.) …. I don’t think about these last parts, however, they’ve only just come up now as I’m typing. What I flash back to how he sought me out after school whilst I was rehearsing for our school operetta. Or he’d be lurking round the boarding school gates and if I had the courage to venture outside (remember I was painfully self-conscious and didn’t ever feel popular) I’d always find him somewhere, dawdling around, having some excuse to still be at school, or I’d find him at athletics practice, he was a long-distance runner – a potential professional.
I flash back to how he asked my friend if he should ask me to be his girlfriend, and when it happened he had a flower to hand me. I remember the stairs we sat on when he did this, and I remember how I didn’t have a cooking-clue how to deal with this kind of situation! But I said yes, a definite yes, no matter how shy I was. I really like him….and suddenly the penny drops, he was my high school sweetheart, and I loved him dearly. I loved him, and he broke my heart. I have never admitted to myself the depths to which he had crept into my heart, as young and naïve as I was. He meant something to me, more than all the others, and I was devastated. But the biggest realization that I’ve had this morning, and what my dream was trying to tell me, is that he was the love of my life. And perhaps, I have spent all these years searching for him in others, I don’t know. But that bit about his “being the love of my life” released a gasp and a sigh all at once right through me. I had no idea. And I think in some strange way I have really missed him for all these years….
When I started dating the much older guy after Owain, it was a way to boost my ego, I see that now. It was possibly one of the worst decisions I have ever made, but I made it none the less and have had to deal with the horrendous emotional consequences. Having dreamed of this older guy a week or so back, was a blessing, my mind’s way of filtering back to this moment, with Owain. It had to sift through all the trash to uncover the treasure. Amazing how after a meaningful moment, followed by intense hurt, we cover it up with as much meaningless stuff as we can – the image I have is of a trash can, where the meaningful treasure lies at the very bottom, and all the vegetable peels, bits of soggy paper, and empty cans and cartons fill it to the top – its no wonder it takes so much time to sift through back to the bottom. After time the trash starts to stick together and mutate into other ghastly things. Alright, enough of that gruesome picture. How intelligent our minds are, to know that part of our healing is having to retrace our steps back to the beginning – the point of deep feelings of love and rejection. I felt terribly rejected when he came back from veldschool and tried t hide away from me. I suppose he couldn’t face me out of guilt, shame.
When I left the school a year later, I wrote him a letter. He had plucked up the courage to speak to me once during the year, catching me completely by surprise. He had moved into boarding school by then and for some reason had managed to seat himself in the dining hall facing me from an angle, just enough for either of us to make eye contact, or surreptitiously observe the other with longing feelings. I sensed him staring at me all the time, and would verify this with my friends. I wondered why he didn’t have the courage to be open about it. But he didn’t. I had started receiving letter from the older still-to-become boyfriend, as he was living in another town, and whenever Owain was near, I’d make a very loud hoo-ha about them. In retrospect this was terribly childish and I’m sure did not ease his feelings, if anything it’s probably the reason why he never made another attempt to ask me out again. (I didn’t think of that. That was really stupid of me, wasn’t it? Gosh, I’m such an idiot – or rather, was an idiot.) I left the school at the end of the second year of being there, and before I left I knew I needed to make some attempt at closure. I wrote him a letter, and told him that despite what had happened, it had been an honour to have him in my life, if just for a small while. Now that I think of it, I held back a lot and probably should have said that I had never stopped thinking of him. Then again, it was still a big thing to do as I had done it. He answered back with a letter. I knew he still thought of me. From a very young age I have been very aware of people’s behaviour with an ability to see past the pretenses of actions, through to the truth inside. (Of course, this doesn’t always work for the observed, especially when it’s a young child making the observations and uncovering what’s really going on.) It doesn’t make it any easier however, especially when I was (and apparently still am) trying to make sense of myself…..I sense I am losing the plot of this story. Need to re-focus. What I’d like to say in ending, and what I will need to take in gently through the day, is the re-surfacing of a love that still yields great tenderness. And an opportunity for me to accept with honesty, feelings that I threw away and covered up so quickly, that weren’t ready to be discarded. Lastly, a chance to be okay with myself and what I felt, that I was not a fool, as I was left thinking. I was anything but. I was brave. I faced his popularity with courage, I faced his delinquent friends too. I never stooped to their ways of doing things and I never got caught up in his celebrity-like status. I stayed as me. Shy, self-conscious, heart-of-strength, truthful me. I had the courage to offer my kind of love to him, it was undecorated and dainty, and it was enough that I gave it that way.
I think, now, I can finally find peace with myself and move on. Assured in the knowledge that what I offered was of the most precious kind. I see now that for years I have questioned the validity of my love, when it should never have been questioned. After that relationship I tried to “fix” my loving manner, and in the process went against my nature, my self-worth, and my values. The parts of me that I had held firm to my heart, and really stood my ground for up until then, throughout my young life. All of my mistakes in relationships and the kinds of relationships I got into thereafter, I see now, stemmed from there. I left that moment believing that my love was inadequate, and if my love was inadequate then I was inadequate. I have, as a result, spent years trying to cover this up, conceal it from the rest of the world, especially my lovers. How terrible, if anyone knew the truth, that my love carried no worth. But Life has given me a chance - I have been or have taken myself back to the point where I questioned myself, and my love.
Goodness, I’m getting tears in my eyes, It was just last night in a moment of self-doubt that I asked my mother if perhaps I had missed something in my giving, in this last relationship I’ve just recently left. If perhaps there was something wrong in my loving. If perhaps I was blinded to a flaw in how I love another. I went to bed desperately asking my Beloved Lady these same questions, begging Her for answers ….. and this morning, what I have written above, is the answer. Moments like this move me so very deeply. My search back to that tender and innocent part of me, where I know myself to be young and in awe of the mystery of life, excited by the prospects of discovering it through adventures, I think I’ve touched on it again. Or at least have recognized it in the distance, after all this time, and I am excited, because it’s Christmas, and inside, it’s the Christmas of my Soul.
(20 December 2007)
( I must just say that whilst writing all of the above, it unfolded for me just as it unfolds for a reader. I had no idea where I was going this morning w hen I started typing, all I knew was that there was an intense feeling of needing to get something down, and that my dream was where to start. And perhaps, it also concludes my questions below in some way…. Cathartic moments like these are powerful and mystical – they bring me closer to myself – and that is pure magic.)
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