Searching for Certainty

Earlier this month, I read Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful.  It will be this month’s book report and I will write at length about the splendidness of this memoir.  I can’t stop thinking about the lessons of life that Smith shares.  One of the things that she says so well is that finding yourself, and taking joy in doing so, doesn’t mean that you don’t mourn what has been lost.  That truth is so much a part of my world these days.  I like myself and I love my solitude.  Those are both really good things.  But it’s still true that I now look toward the future without the certainty of a partner; of a life together.  I am sometimes quite happy in the moment.  I know with certainty that the end of my relationship with T was the right path.  But I am still afraid of the uncertainty that lies ahead.  We will not grow older together; the happy adventures we once daydreamed about together will not happen.  Together is gone.  I grieve the loss of a certain future even while I am grateful for the peace of not coming home to dark moods and an unfathomable anger.  I miss the shared intimacy of a joke; a phrase; an experience that brought laughter.  I once thought of them as the solid building blocks of a life together; they reflected a shared history that now lingers in the air, untethered and uncertain.  I sometimes struggle to make peace with that, as if I am trying to put together a puzzle even though I know for a fact that some of the pieces are no longer in the box.