i miss having a person

someone to stand by my side when everyone else has given up & thinks all hope is lost and will tell them - Try again;
someone who will sit and talk me through my tears when, in trying to be compassionate, i have placed myself in emotional harm's way;
someone who (despite both of our penchant for distance) will know to wrap me in a hug to bring me back into this world;
someone to sit shiva with me when the love of my life is gone;
someone to cut me out of the wedding dress that represents every way that i have given up my self;
someone who will mourn & shed tears over the loss of my (very likely only theoretical) never-will-be-born child with a ferocity that carries both of our pain & grief when i am too pained to cry;
someone who will tell my shrink (yes i have one), with a resolute passion that is unwavering, "She's not done. she still needs help. you have to help her" to save me from my own delusions;
someone who will walk me down the (likely only theoretical) aisle, serving as the stand-in for the one who can do so no longer, and then stand at my side as my maid-of/best- person;
someone who accepts all of my dark & twisty parts;
someone who will accept me as I try to move closer to healthy & whole and change as a result, but will never pass judgment on those dark & twisty parts that still linger - giving me space or distance or time to grow even if that growth takes me (for a time) away.

i miss having someone who's my person, who's person i am too.

this is what i have learned this summer.

this summer, when i lost the only man who i know w/absolute certainty loved me for who i was and in spite of the very many things that i wasn't;
in this summer when the unimaginable kept happening, again and again and again;
this summer, which has taught me the real meaning of irreparable.

this summer i realized how much i missed having a person, needed to have a person. and in this summer of awe-striking despair & death & sickness & the sickening, stomach-gripping approach of more death - i am certain that i need a person in ways that cannot be expressed.

i have, at various points in my life, had a person. Sometimes female, sometimes male. sometimes i have had more than one person at the same time. that is a blessing.

if i remain as single as i have been for longer than i care to recount, i can survive. i will be sad; i will (sometimes) be lonely; i will hurt. but i will survive.

i am not sure, however, how long i will fare w/out having a person.

God i am voicing my need & making my request known.
universe, consider yourself placed on notice.

~J

Post-script: i know that many of you don't understand when i post status messages that can only be described as love notes to the writers and actors on grey's anatomy.

i don't know what it says about me, but for the last few years, the time that i spend with the folks on grey's has been more tangible & visceral than the moments that i'm with "real" ppl. i can't really say that i can explain why that is. what i do know is that since the moment that i began losing the people who counted as my person, grey's has been there. it arrived right on cue - enter stage left.

the characters in this show - their quirks and pains, and hidden stories, and fears and hopes and (seeming) contradictions and vulnerabilities have been more real to me, have done more to touch me & to hold me in this world than the flesh & blood "real" folks in life. they have been constant; the one constant presence, welcoming me to laugh, and cry, and scream, and tremble. they have grown and evolved making my growth & evolution (even in it's ugliest and most shameful phases) acceptable, legitimate, fine. watching the unfolding of complexity & brokenness & in-need-of-saving & emotional stuntedness & intricacy that they exhibit makes me feel like perhaps the same in me can find peace, or at least, home.

there are moments in which that ensemble of grey's may have very well saved me, because those 60 minutes that i spend w/them on thursdays week after week have very often been the only ones that make me feel - known.

in the absence of a person present to be "my person" grey's has been my person. and so i write love notes - to them, to the universe, to god - because i am grateful