Oh, these storms—literal and metaphorical. The shift in temperature and the salt air has come on the heels of increasing emotional challenges.
It’s been a difficult couple of weeks as I try to take care of doctor appointments, belongings, and longings at the Texas coast.
I loved this area when I lived here. I loved my homes in Pearland, League City, and Surfside Beach, even if I never felt quite settled after we left Pearland.
Pearland has grown like a hungry amoeba and gobbled up vast amounts of land, spitting out wide swaths of concrete roads and shopping centers. It’s a busy, stress-filled area now and nothing like the sleepy suburbs of my daughter’s childhood and the early years of my second marriage. Its landscape is barely discernible (to me) from South Houston’s. As I drive from the Cullen area into Pearland, I sense no significant shift in textures or shades except better-maintained roads.
As I drive from Pearland down to Surfside Beach, my mood shifts. In Pearland I was anxious. There are specters there I wish to avoid. At the beach, I am simply sad. The ghosts that remain there are not drifting, corporeal beings but dense, heavy memories: eating in this restaurant with my ex, saving pelicans on this beach, whispering in that dark driveway with that beautiful man, crumbling to my knees on that quiet oyster shell road as I mourned leaving them all while knowing I must, nonetheless, leave. Sometimes memories are simultaneously formless and weighted with unbearable loss.
In a 5’ x 10’ space in a nearby town, my past is stacked and looming. I’ve struggled to get through it. Time is running out, and all but one of my appointments have been completed. I will need to clean my space, pack up, then depart in ten days. I want to be done sooner but feel sure I cannot. Even if I finish the sorting sooner, the last appointment is nine days away.
Every night, as I try to shake off the humid Houston air, hot or cold, and all these clinging ghosts, I gasp for breath just as I did on that deserted, island road. I feel I am reliving every loss of the last three years in this single month, and I don’t know how to navigate this. I want to run to whom I swore I would never run to again and seek something of solace, however brief it may be, to get through the next ten days. I cannot. I promised him that, but more importantly, I promised myself. There is nothing but emptiness in his brief comfort—and weakness in turning to it.
It is difficult being alone in this world, but I have been alone since 2012. Having a partner doesn’t guarantee partnership. Loving someone who doesn’t know how to love me in return, whether it be my spouse or a ghost who simply needed some small part of me for his ego, only brought me more loneliness.
I will navigate it. I will survive this daily onslaught of grief. I always do.
I always do.
I do it with poems and family and blogs and dog walks and TikToks.
But…
Oh, these storms!
Last Updated on March 24, 2023 by Lee Ellis
