cast away

Dear Soulmate,

I feel like Tom Hanks in Cast Away tonight, alone at sea, adrift on a raft, looking up at the stars.

It is really over. And it hurts in a way that you do not even feel pain. After all the anger and frustration subside and all the unanswered questions settle like water in a glass, I am motionless. Finally I am peacefully still.

Truthfully, I feel like part of me has died. I feel like something wonderful has been lost and I worry that the void will never be filled. I used to be afraid that if I did not miss him or feel heartbroken that I would not feel anything at all. Now I know that feeling nothing at all is strangely beautiful.

I ran this morning to try to clear my head. I tried to undo all the moments, all the kisses, all the laughs in the afternoon, all the pieces that used to fit. I tried to pull apart the puzzle… and put it back in its box.

And I did just that.

I took out the letters, the CDs, the mementos, even deleted songs off of my iTunes that had built up over time. Time has a way of collecting memories like dust. But now all my souvenirs of my love have been boxed up and tucked away. And I feel empty now, like a sold house without furniture after its occupants leave.

I wish him the best of everything… I do. The days that follow will not be easy. The nights will be long, I know. And this will all take time. But I am not ashamed to say that I am proud of how far we came- every moonlit drive along the coast, every park bench we sat on in the sun, every morning we spent sipping coffee together.

It was all real. And that means everything to me.

Love, R

a letter to the single ones

Dear Soulmate,

As I walked through the winding streets of the North End yesterday, in a desperate attempt to shield myself from the ever-invasive, unusually strong wind, I noticed a wet page from a newspaper that stubbornly clung to the sidewalk from the melted snowbanks.

The headline read in bold words, “Can’t buy me love.”

the best things in life are free

And that is exactly what I thought about as I made my way home. How silly and pretentious it is to buy roses and chocoloates as a means of saying “I love you.”

From my experiences in love, I have always felt that the most simple and unexpected gestures are always the most meaningful. Recall that feeling of finding one another’s gaze across a crowded room and smiling. Or when, in the middle of the night, you feel their hand pull yours closer toward them to rest it on their chest. Or even when they unexpectedly put their arms around you from behind as you read the mail in the kitchen.

These gestures all say, ‘I love you.’

And now I realize, as I have gotten used to sleeping alone and standing on my own two feet without the expectation of someone walking beside me, that maybe we have got Valentine’s Day all wrong.

It isn’t about a day for lover’s- for they celebrate Valentine’s Day everyday, and they do so in subtle, beautiful ways. Valentine’s Day is a day to remind people that they, too, will find that kind of love. It is a day for the single ones.

And while you cannot go out looking for love, you can at least open your heart to the possibility.

And no, no one can buy your love- it is too expensive.

Love, R

p.s. write your valentine today: “your soulmate, your letter”

“just too busy being fabulous”

Dear Soulmate,

As I sat in class today, spinning my pen in my hand, my mind naturally wandered to places I would have rather been.

And then a night came back to me, one from about a year ago around this time.

“So where is a pretty girl like you from?” an old man asked from the end of the bar.

“Boston,” I smiled, as I pressed my Corona bottle to my lips and took a long sip.

“Really? Well I’m here on that yacht over there,” he said, pointing in the direction of the harbor where his ship dwarfed the pier with glitzy lights that reflected over the still water.

“Nice,” I said, trying to look impressed, although the lines on the yacht were all wrong and completely disproportionate.

“Where are you coming from?” I asked, assuming he was here on vacation.

“Family Christmas vacation- you have to meet my grandsons,” he interrupted himself. “There are about twenty of them down here.”

I looked around the bar at the few lingering strangers. Most of them looked younger than I, and I was not inclined to go introduce myself. I realized how terrible I was at hiding my desperation as I eyed every prospect that infrequently came in view of the bar to buy another drink.

By midnight, I was mingling with people from all over the world. I met a handsome guy who I neglected to even remember his name, leaving me to wonder if I ever introduced myself at all.

“Want to go to the beach?” I asked him casually.

“No thanks,” he said as he turned his back to me.

Slightly surprised, but no less inclined to go to the beach alone, I took a few more sips of my beer before sliding off my bar stool.

“Well where is it?” the handsome foreign stranger asked politely in broken English, turning toward me again.

When we left the bar, we struggled to climb a hill that eventually fell to meet the sea again in a stretch of white sand and silver palms shining beneath the moon. We walked the quarter mile stretch of beach before turning around. The moon glowed brightly upon the sand and the surf glistened as it rolled into shore, each waved tangled with a thousand little diamonds.

“I dare you to go swimming,” I teased. “You only live once, and besides, how many times in your life are you going to be strolling one of the most beautiful beaches in the world under a near full moon, with an American girl?”

A few minutes later he stripped off his shirt, extending his arms overhead.

“Fine,” he said, “You don’t think I’ll do it, do you?” He set his empty beer bottle down in the sand and slipped off his shorts. I stripped off my shirt, following his lead, and slid my gauze shirt from my hips. My necklace reflected bits of the moonlight as I walked toward the water where he was wading in. He dove below the surface into an oncoming wave and shook his head upon surfacing. I dove into the next wave and smoothed my wet hair with my hands after I surfaced. We both looked at each other laughing.

We did not kiss, and to this day I still wonder why. It would have been too cliché I suppose; moonlit beach, secluded island, handsome foreign stranger.

Love, R

on top of the world

Dear Soulmate,

How do you forget the way it felt to kiss someone, to touch them, to love them? When do you wake up and forget the way it used to be when your life felt complete and whole, a perfect harmony of happiness and bliss?

How do you forget the way it felt to be on top of the world?

Probably the worst advice that has ever been given by anyone is “move on.” The words slip so easily from the mouths of those we love, even the mouths of those who we’ve kissed in the most intimate of moments. But what happens when someone you have been so completely in love with, tells you to “move on”

Where to, I might ask?

Cold Sunday mornings like today make me wake feeling discomforted by the fact that I have simply gotten used to being out of that kind of beautifully wholesome love. What people really mean when they say, “move on,” is simply just don’t look back. The moment you look behind at how good you once felt in your past is the moment where the present feels incomplete.

So without looking back I get through the days, looking ahead to you instead. But still I cannot forget where I’ve been.

And I wonder still, is it really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?

All my love, R

p.s. share the love

by the time you finally meet me

Dear Soulmate,

There are so many times when I convince myself that I have seen you or perhaps will see you in the near future. Every corner I turn, every door that I open, I always have this hope that our paths will cross.

I wonder, is it wrong to always be thinking of you in this frantic treasure hunt kind of way? Why can’t I just sit back and wait for you to come to me, or at least wait for time to author our story? Why do I have this incessant urge to pursue you.

I suppose the easiest answer is that I feel at a loss when I look around at other people holding hands and kissing. I feel at a loss when I watch movies where Hollywood stages captivating romances entangled in real life scenarios.

I feel at a loss without you.

the notebook's allie and noah

When I look around at everyone else who appears in love, I too want to share laughter, kisses and stories with someone who cares about me. While I am certainly not alone, I sometimes cannot help but feel it. This I suppose only makes me human.

While you may argue that my longing for you is simply a product of the holidays that remind me that it is the season for love and being loved, or maybe the cold nights followed by colder mornings, my yearning for you stems from another notion.

I fear that you will have missed so much of me by the time I finally meet you. And I fear that I will miss so much of you by the time you finally meet me.

While I am still young it is easy to harken back to my past loves, as those memories are not buried too deeply in my past.  I recall how I grew with all of them, and how they all saw me at my best and worse. I suppose you, too, will grow with me during a different more mature stage of my life. And you, too, will see me at my best and my worst.

What gives me comfort is knowing that who we are today has everything to do with where we are coming from.

All my love, R

in memory’s attic

Dear Soulmate,

I’ll admit that it’s sometimes difficult to believe in you. I’ll admit that there are times I doubt that you will ever come around. I’ll admit that there are times I am convinced our paths will never cross.

I realize though, as I sit here in seemingly idle thought, that these doubts only make me human.

Perhaps it is the holidays that always have a way of making me feel more alone instead of grateful for the love of family and friends I have all around me.

Truthfully, I just want to feel wanted again. The only way I can even imagine what that feeling may be like is if I go back- into that dreadfully prohibited place where memories cease to collect dust but instead flow freely despite the cluttered avenues of my mind.

What makes my past experiences so appealing is the thought that somewhere amidst all the memories of kissing in the rain and stealing affectionate glances, there arrives the curious and intriguing possibility that my past may just be my ticket to the future.

Have I already met you, soulmate?

There’s an old expression that says there’s a reason why some people in your past never make it to your future. Instead those people become either polished trophies or rusted antiques stored in boxes labeled “experience” stacked somewhere in memory’s attic.

If you are in fact a polished trophy, need you be stored only in my memory? Why can’t I parade you around instead, showing the world that I have found that all-encompassing achievement, life’s most beautiful reward. That I, too, have found love.

Perhaps I have simply forgotten you- like a trophy in the attic, gone unnoticed even after all the effort it took to earn it. Maybe love goes unnoticed sometimes.

Maybe one day I will reopen those boxes and find you.

Love, R

are you ready?

Dear Soulmate,

I am always intrigued when people ask others if they are ready for something, particularly love. What I find more fascinating is the response to this question.

Over Sunday morning coffee with an old friend I began to wonder, is anybody ready for love?

As the rain outside started to turn into a snowy drizzle, I sat across from my friend who argued that you have to go out looking for love if you ever hope to find it.

But I believe my odds of finding love are the same regardless if I am standing in a crowded bar or wandering alone alongside the ocean. There are no great ways to increase your chances of finding love. It finds you.

While I did not agree with my friend on many of the points he made, we did agree that timing is everything, which begs my original question, how then, can one be ready?

The most simple answer is that you can never be ready to fall in love any more than you can be ready for any of the other curve balls that life throws at you. Think for a moment how dull life would be if you were ready for most everything that came your way. You would be completely unsurprised and where there was once mystery and excitement there’s instead dullness and predictability.

That is perhaps what makes love all the more fascinating; the twists and turns, expecting the unexpected, never knowing who you will meet and when you will meet them.

To return to my friend’s argument, there is certainly logic in the rational that going out every weekend will greatly increase one’s chances of meeting someone special. But how uninteresting and mundane it would be to be to sweep someone off their feet when they see it coming.

The really great love stories are the ones you never really expected to read, in places you never really expected to find.

So then the question remains, are you ready for a good story?

Love, R

you complete me

Dear Soulmate,

So here we are again, a thousand worlds away from one another but together in this lifetime.

I don’t even know anything about you, but at the same time I feel I know everything. It’s an incredibly complicated but beautiful contradiction.

I bet you like to sail. I bet you sleep in late. I bet you like to drive when your upset, shifting gears and switching songs. I bet you have brown hair that you never style but it always falls across your forehead perfectly, even when you wake up. I bet you have wonderful plans for the future that make your eyes light up when someone asks you where you see yourself in five or ten years. And somehow, I hope the answer is with me.

Love is hard though, it’s a difficult journey. You know that scene in Jerry MaGuire where Dorothy (Renee Zellweger) is standing in the kitchen and tells her sister Laurel that she is in love. This is an incredibly brave thing to say because sometimes, especially at the beginning of a relationship, there is so much uncertainty and doubt that suppresses the excitement and butterflies from that first kiss.

People often tell one another that they love them without regard to the consequences. Love changes though. People learn that they cannot promise each other everything, that they cannot fill their expectations. When Dorothy tells Jerry that she deserves his soul- all of him, in order for their love to truly work, there is a moment of tragedy in the realization that it may not work out after all.

You know that pivotal moment when you realize that love is not on the same page anymore? I hope that we never feel that way with one another. I know that we will fight, I know we will disagree. I know we will get upset. We are only human.

And I cannot promise you that it will be easy for me to tell you that I love you for the first time, simply because it will have taken me so long to say. The reason for this is because I know that when I tell you that I love you, it will be forever.

I know you will promise me just the same because I deserve that much, too.

Love, R