It was one of those random Facebook posts – open the nearest book to page 45, read the first sentence on the page, and it will tell you how you see love. The nearest book was The Reconstructionist by Josephine Hart. A favorite of mine, beautifully written. A book that I owned a while ago, it was lost when I loaned it to someone who never returned it. It was always that way with hardcopy books – you never loaned out anything you loved, because unlike many other things, if you set it free, it never returned. I searched for it for a long time, but they were no longer printing it (I later found out the author had passed). And then, one day, there it was on Amazon.
I opened up the book to page 45 and the sentence read:
“I do not slide down, completely under the water.”
And that was me, in one heartbreakingly accurate sentence. I refused to let myself sink into the warmth. I refused to be vulnerable, I refused to open up completely. In deep conversations, I never crossed that line, where just one tiny crack could become a seismic event, and the crack could grow, fracture, and destroy my very core. I held tight to my darkness and my secret fears, keeping them wrapped around me for protection. But they weren’t protecting me, they were drowning me. How funny that the very thing I was afraid of, sinking under the warm water, was the very thing that was happening any way. If I just allowed myself to sink, my lover would be there, waiting to offer me air, giving me a warm soft place to be. If only I allowed myself to sink, under the warm water.