My love, my commitment, my marriage had a universal wholeness to them. They were sacred. And, I guarded them with my life. It is a strange thing to really sit with a new universal truth after the breakdown of our collective coupling.  To sit after the decimation of hard grief that took my life and turned it into a freak-show of sorts… making me feel like the spectacle of everyone else’s gratitude that they weren’t us. I know that feeling because I too have looked at someone else’s life and held fast to the man in my bed, grateful that I was me, and he was he, and we were we. We were safe. We were real love. We were the distance. I was his everything and he was mine.

Truth. Always arrives when you least expect it to. While the love was true and deep and sacred, the people were human.  Our love wasn’t enough to heal addiction, childhood abuse and self-loathing. The love became another reason for my love to see himself as not worthy and therefore it became its own kind of poison.

The healing is out there, I know in my soul that it is for both of us. So,  I surrendered myself to feel, to really feel the total disconnect of our marriage as it unravelled. The truth between that sacred we, is that each person had to save themselves.  The separation, the fear, the fall. I fell through layers of my life, the constructs I had built for myself, brick by brick, year after year, holiday after holiday. All of my previous identities, some truthful; girlfriend, model, actress, woman, wife, employee, business owner needed to be destroyed. And some that were part of a collective hoping, some that would elude me, mother, wife, homemaker, needed to be grieved for. They deserved my attention as I fearfully try to let them go…one by one.

For today, I live in a new city. I work a new job, I don’t own these streets like the ones in Los Angeles. But my adoptive city has risen up to meet me and welcome me as I take back my life and re-assure myself that the love I miss, that sacred love, is still possible. That the love I miss, the identity of home, lover, person that I belong to and with is changing, but that if I can surrender my ego and allow my heart to ache and heal simultaneously …it will come again.

My love says he would like to try again, my heart says she’s not sure she can trust again…but she is hopeful.