Threshold Part 2: After the Storm
DAY EIGHTTEEN:
Darkness begins to gather, not because evening has arrived, but because the storm is finally arriving. Just because the threshold has been breached doesn’t mean the storm is over.
Thunder cracks the sky apart, and a loud rumble rolls through the space it leaves behind. Heavy drops of rain begin to fall, slow at first, then harder.
Something about this weather feels right.
It mimics the turbulence inside me. This violent unraveling of something that once held two lives together. Intertwined. Only now…
Splitting.
Such a perfectly fitting word.
Lightning tears through the air so quickly, so cleanly, so intensely, it literally tears paired atoms apart. The thunder that follows is the sound of a sonic boom from the air being forced apart by the lightning’s path.
Two worlds.
Two Lives.
Separating.
How do you begin to pull apart years of shared morning coffee, gently sweet moments, inside jokes, and the small pocketed worlds you’ve built together along the way?
Just a handful of days ago, it was my birthday, and before that, this house was still a home.
A hundred and one years of history have sat within these old walls. Old doors with their curious knobs, as if plucked right from Alice in Wonderland. Windows that brought in the perfect afternoon light. A stubborn pecan tree out back that makes me nervous during storms like this and it drops its harvest across the yard every year.
Beloved and annoying all at once.
And the room that has been so many things for us.
The art room. The plant room. His room. My room.
The room where morning light spills through the window and a female cardinal arrives nearly every day beneath the porch, as if she has some important news to share with me.
This room holds my corner office space, my quiet daily rituals, my attempts to make sense of my world.
It has also held the slow realization that the person I have loved might have been drifting away long before the knowing set it, before I allowed myself to see it.
Now the walls begin to grow bare. Some boxes packed. Others are still left empty.
The smell of packing tape will forever make my stomach churn.
The life we built together is being slowly packed away, piece by piece, not to be moving into a new home together, but for a separation.
Two people moving in opposite directions.
There is this strange liminal place that exists between love and a slow departure.
A place where nothing has officially ended yet, it has, but it hasn’t. There’s this gravity between the two people that begins to loosen its hold, while also staying in orbit.
We still discuss our days, still have coffee in the mornings, and make dinner for two.
Five years do not disappear in a single conversation.
It loosens slowly. Painfully.
But inside this slow unraveling lives a trapped animal, a quiet violence.
Because every ordinary moment, occurrence, or mention of plans becomes more evidence of something changing.
The small gestures of partnership begin to disappear.
And suddenly the house itself feels like it too, is holding its breath.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, the storm inside me arrived with gale-force winds. Not the sharp kind of anger, no, this was the deeper kind.
The kind that whispers dangerously venomous things.
Burn the whole thing down.
Make them hurt as you hurt.
Obliterate it all.
I could almost hear a door splintering inside my chest, inside my heart, and in my head.
It is so frightening how quickly a wounded heart begins to befriend cruelty. How quickly grief can dress itself as justice, and quickly consume you.
For a moment, I pondered how far a person has to be pushed before they become the villain everyone expects them to be. How much pain, hurt, and betrayal can one heart hold before it withers away?
But villains don’t ask those sorts of questions. They don’t sit all somber-like in a thunderstorm, wondering where the love went, or what more they could have done.
And they certainly don’t spend their nights writing things down, trying to understand how life can collapse so suddenly.
The storm eventually begins to pass, both external and within. As storms tend to do. But the water it left behind had somewhere else to go.
So, I found myself sitting on a rock in the middle of an overflowing creek, at the edge of a waterfall. Feet submerged in the cold rush of runoff from the previous night’s passing storm. The roar of the falls filled the air, steady and relentless.
So much water.
The creek had swollen beyond its usual boundaries, filling every corner of the limestone bed before spilling over the edge.
Just like these emotions.
The thoughts.
The grief.
Even nature can only hold so much before it overflows.
Emotional Torture.
That is what this in-between space feels like.
Neither are leaving immediately, nor staying together to fix it. And watching someone you spent years beside, learning them, growing with them, beginning to disappear— it’s a form of torture.
I truly believed we could have made it work, to have braved the storm together, but isn’t that what we all think?
Instead, my body feels as if it has been taking on water for these last few weeks.
Slowly sinking.
And somehow, somewhere inside all of this chaos inside my mind, there’s a muffled realization that begins to form.
Perhaps one of the greatest dangers in love is not betrayal or things ending so abruptly.
Perhaps the greatest danger is when we begin to abandon parts of ourselves to ‘just keep the peace’, or ‘too afraid to hurt feelings’.
I told myself I was just being too sensitive.
That I was reading too much into things.
For a long while, I told myself the distance was just my imagination.
Everyone knows what abandonment is in some form or another.
Parents leaving you with a sitter.
The first day of daycare.
A childhood pet running away.
A friend moving away, or worse, deciding they no longer want to be your friend.
But this kind of leaving is very different. This kind of leaving dismantles entire worlds— past, present, and future.
And yet, here I am.
Still breathing, though barely.
Still writing, sometimes through gritted teeth.
Still learning how to stand and how to take up space.
The storm may have split the sky apart, just as my grief may have caused some casualties, but the earth beneath us all still remains.
And so do I.
Comments