Twenty years from now you are going to look back at this and wonder how it was possible to be so lonely, so withdrawn into yourself like the shriveled husk a dead beetle leaves behind when its soul departs. You’ll wonder how you never noticed, or, for that matter, cared about the things that were in front of you.
You are going to see yourself, once and for all, as the flawed, brilliant, messed-up human being that you ultimately are, the one that has recurring bouts of depression and has sudden, intense cravings for things like refried beans and frozen strawberry juice. You’ll see that all your eccentricities, the way you twirled your pencil in class when you were bored and chewed on the eraser end, the obsessive-compulsive tendencies that were bad but not quite bad enough to warrant an official diagnosis, were all the things that made you better.
We are so focused on having someone else beside us, so full of desire that it almost turns carnal. We don’t like our yawns, how they sound like snores, our hips, our on-and-off-again diets that never seem to work, the stretch marks on our legs. We are prone to irritation and angry retorts and leaving our dishes unwashed in the sink. But what we fail to see is that the person we are going to marry or become soulmates with once passed us on the street, or brushed their hand against our shoulder in a movie theater.
We have met our better halves, some only once or twice, others countless times over the course of a few months. We are living among them, now.
What we do not understand, or perhaps have tried not to, is that we are constantly forming different versions of ourselves from year to year. The versions we don’t like are the ones we abandon; all 27 bodies we once tried on like oversized shirts are now laying around somewhere, in gutters or in the changing rooms of shopping malls, and the newest version we’ve created, the one we’re wearing now, is the one that is the most important. What matters is not who you once were, but who you are now, in this very moment.
Someone right now is in your apartment, making you dinner, taking off their socks, mouthing the words to their favorite song, running the water for a bath, taking out the garbage. Someone is filling your glass with more wine, taking your hand in theirs and drawing you to them like a marionette. They are covering all your empty spaces with theirs until the two of you are complete.
There is nowhere else you should rather be right now. This is what wholeness feels like, and, after so many seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, of searching for your other half, here they are. Here you are.
Welcome home.