Keeper of My Past, Holder of My Future

The cost of a new relationship is almost prohibitive. Every passing year represents more of my biography that I will have to convey in two dimensional words; that he won’t experience first hand. He will not be able to recall what I looked like with long hair, or know how much I have grown and changed since college, he will not remember my brother's wedding, or have a sense of how I fit into my Austin life and how that lead me to where I am today. I will have to re-have every conversation I have ever invested in someone else. I have to repeatedly open up for the inevitable rejection to come. This is not melodrama, for I’ve yet to be in a relationship that has not ended. Every go at the goal takes a little piece of me so that I have less to give away next time. The journey has left me so travel worn that I sometimes am afraid there will be nothing left of myself to give him when he finally finds me.

Singlehood has been a constant theme in my life for the past year. Leaving the warm embrace of the YSA put a point on the subtle unspoken nub that innervates my whole being. All my efforts, my social structure, my thoughts of the future are pointed in a single direction, which ironically I have no control over. This thought is new in comparison my actual state. I have always been a single being, a single entity, companionless since before the world had a way to keep time. I was created as an individual with independence and agency and then tasked with finding my own compliment. I have never been part of something bigger than my whole. Yet my creator saw fit to instill a sometimes severe longing in me to tell me that my utter happiness can be found there.

In this past year, the inevitable, defeatist thought has occurred to me that it might never happen for me. That I am to walk this Earth alone, forever in the same state. That the full measure of my creation will never be achieved. I am fully cognizant that I cannot let that thought live and grow in my breast for it is a poison that will kill the soft, warm light within me. Recently I was reminded and came to a greater appreciation that with God, like the mythical Fate and her skein, there is always a design. I have to trust that I am not single by accident. In the last ten years of my eternal search, I have not been simply marking time or stagnating. I have oft contemplated what the purpose of these fallow years have been. The answers are always different and varied as the shades of blue, but one thought that I come back to most often would be that I needed this time to fully appreciate who I am as a whole before blending it with another. My nature is to give, to serve, and to think of others and then focus on my own needs. Had I been blended earlier in my life with another, I don't know if I could distinguish where I stopped and he began. That kind of selflessness could have left me with exactly what the word suggests, without self. All traces of individuality obliterated, and I am unsure once that became my situation I could have ever pulled out of it.

Today I am a whole and complete person. My edges are clearly defined and I know I can offer another a companion and not simply a moldable block of clay that will conform to what he thinks he wants. I know I take God's statement, "It is not good for man to be alone" to near mania at times, which causes me to question my faith in his design for me. I must stop acting as an obstinate child, demanding a snack now with no concept that dinner is but an hour away. I must trust in Him whom I have chosen to follow, for I am already walking the path. How much happier and calm will I be if I just take faith in the journey? Even if I pass out of this life in my single state, I can recognize that he asked of me to make an Abrahamic sacrifice and will try to understand what it truly means to give him my all, even my dearest desire.

I step back and look at what it means to be a person. I am my awe inspiring timeline that yawns out into the eternities. I am every thought I have ever had. I am every place I have ever been. I am all my wishes and desires. I am the massive depth that represents the sum total of all my experiences. It is overwhelming to think about what is encompassed in that, in my all, and then have to consider that he is just as massive, that he is just complex and deep. To take and mesh these two vast and entirely separate beings into one seems just as improbable as most things that require faith. Thinking of that helps me to understand why God might be taking things slower than I would like, taking things on his own timeline. While waiting means my other half will not be the keeper of my past as I had always envisioned he would be, I will, for today, take comfort that he will someday be the holder of my future.