blog - Page 9 of 10 - cricket speaks.

4…anthony.

April 16th, 2023

Let’s call him Anthony because that’s a nice name.

I first saw Anthony in a coffee shop right around the corner from my place. He caught my attention immediately. He looked like an Abercrombie model, with dark tan skin, long wavy blonde hair, and green eyes. He gave off a surfer-like vibe.

I was never boy-crazy and could count on two fingers the number of guys I was ever interested in. My head being turned by a handsome man for more than a second was not a thing. But there was something about Anthony that I felt drawn to, and I couldn’t stop looking at him. Every time I looked up, our eyes met but we both left the shop that day having said nothing to each other.

I saw him there again and the same thing happened. Eyes. In a crowded room, meeting. Over and over again. This time, I was with my roommate, and after some coffee and conversation, she and I left the packed coffee shop together. Just before I walked out, I turned to steal one last glance at him, and there he was…in a sea of head tops and distracted faces…flashing all of those amazingly bright teeth in his amazingly brilliant smile. At me. It was a sign.

My roommate, privy to my crush, notified me the next time she was at the cafe: “Your man is here.” So, like a good little stalker, I showed up as fast as I could and set myself up to “work,” facing him, shy and brave as I was.

My roommate left.

The stalkee approached………

“Hi, I’m Anthony. I thought it was about time to introduce myself.” His voice was really deep, and it was shaking as he spoke…he seemed nervous. And serious. His name was more formal than I had imagined. I thought he’d be a Trevor or a Drew or something. I suddenly felt finicky. Maybe my intuition had been off about him. Things seemed so rigid between us. Maybe this guy wasn’t for me. But he did get my attention, and I did get his, and that had never happened to me before. I couldn’t ignore it.

Anthony told me that he was in the middle of studying for his boards (being a med student), and that in a month or so, he would be free and would love to take me out.

I was amused and impressed by his discipline. I said yes.

We didn’t wait quite that long to go out. We saw each other at the coffee shop and talked, and friended each other on facebook. Things felt more comfortable. And then one evening, when I was hungry because I hadn’t eaten all day, he swept me off to Whataburger, which he liked to joke about from then on…how our first date was at Whataburger…”setting the bar low.”

You know what? We had the best time there. He was funny and charming, creative and witty. He responded to the things that I was saying instead of only listening to himself talk, to which I had grown accustomed on dates. It was more fun and easy and synergetic than any date I’d been on before. We filled out a comment card together. I was smitten.

Anthony said “I love you” soon after that…a week or two later. He told me that he had been in two serious relationships (one of them having ended recently). Ironically, right before meeting me, he had decided to be single for the rest of his life…that being in a serious relationship was just too complicated and draining…not worth it. He said that I was low-maintenance and that he appreciated that I didn’t play games. It was true, and I felt proud of that.

We were both 27 when we met but he was a few months younger, and he always liked to joke about being with an “old woman.” When people would ask how we met, he told them that I couldn’t take my eyes off of him, that I was so distracted I was reading my book upside down. Which was untrue and annoying…and also somehow endearing. He loved to watch my eyes roll when he said that, and I loved that he loved something that I did.

I was pleased that Anthony had changed his mind about love. Not only did I feel that our budding relationship was very special, but I believed with everything I had that love didn’t have to be hard, and that even if it was, love was always worth it. I really looked forward to showing him that because I got the impression that for him love had been unsafe and so it was easier not to get too attached. There was a supernatural element to the way that we met. Both of us acknowledged it. It was magical; it was fate; it was kismet; it was God merging our paths.

————–

The months after meeting each other were difficult, and just…strange. Anthony left for his first medical rotation across the country, hours and hours away. After a couple of months, he came home to visit. After a couple more, I went to visit him. And so on and so forth, through multiple rotations. In a nutshell, we only had a few weeks to get to know each other before he left home and the two of us, being totally serious about our relationship, launched ourselves into a long-distance one. That was made all the more challenging, I suppose, by the fact that neither of us were phone talkers, so…we were going off of some vaguely-defined commitment to a future together. There were some hiccups and concerns all along the way, but we kept to our plan, despite not having hashed out any of the details. Somehow, we managed to get engaged the same year, and we were married one year after that.

Anthony arrived home from school one day before our (gigantic) Christmastime wedding.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

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3…off the cusp.

April 15th, 2023

Every time I think back to this phase in time, it’s like a scene from a movie where the sun is shining and everyone is happy and smiling…but the soundtrack has cringey tones, and you just know something disturbing is right around the corner. Or like a bad dream where everyone you meet is lovely but it’s because they’ve all had lobotomies.

Despite the recent loss, I was somehow high on life for just a short while. The world was full of Love and Light…a beautiful, exuberant place to be…and I couldn’t imagine getting enough of it.

I might have been able to guess what was coming next, based on past (pre-medicated) experience, but I didn’t.

The descent came quick and hard. I never quite remember how this part happens. It’s just suddenly there. It’s simultaneously anticlimactic and excruciating. Anguish and despair show up on my doorstep to remind me where I came from. They taunt me for having ever been joyful and thinking that I could be free. I can barely function and I see only darkness. The tears flow day and night and I wish that I could just cease to exist. I believe in those times that it would be better for everyone if I had never existed in the first place.

Lies. This is what it is to be in Hell.

It’s not fun to talk about–nor, I imagine, to read. I want to skip right past it, even in my own mind–but it is, of course, part of the story.

And also what happens to me in this muck, in this post-manic phase, is that I become even more attached to my newly formed obsessions. My passion isn’t extinguished; it’s fueled by my depression.

In this case, my intense but carefree infatuation turned into a fierce longing. I could not live without Superbloom. And now I was aware of the formidable suffering which would be required of me to become pregnant and lose another baby. It wasn’t all fun and games, on either count, but I was still as in as ever, and desperate to be.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

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2…epiphanies.

April 8th, 2023

Then it all made sense. The universe. My reason for being in it. The interconnectedness of us all. My life was currently a cascade of epiphanies that had me full of this “everything,” and I was in total bliss. Sure, others would think it was totally strange that I spontaneously fell in love essentially with a stranger (let’s call her Superbloom, for fun) based on the memory of an interaction I’d had with her weeks before, or that I suddenly believed my miscarriages to be a way to save other mothers from soul-crushing pain. But in my defense, that’s why I didn’t tell anyone. I stayed right there with my fantasies where it all made sense.

This was my second miscarriage; the first was tough to grapple with after having tried for eons to conceive. I had wondered why it had to happen to us…a married, responsible, financially-able, church-attending, child-seeking couple. We were set up well; we were ready. With all our attempts and “failures,” to be honest, I wondered why God, the Supreme Being, would allow–and even choreograph–this to happen. All around us, it seemed that happy-go-lucky teenagers were getting pregnant (accidentally), and then having the luxury to choose whether or not to make a go of the whole parenting thing or whether or not to abort. It was mockery.

To be brutally honest, I wondered why God hated me.

I then went down all of the paths that that kind of wandering takes you without really getting anywhere. I turned around. I prayed. I grieved. I said rosaries every day and went to church. I “meditated,” if that’s what you call it. I can’t say I ever understood why things happened the way they did, but I eventually came to peace with our miscarriage and came to terms with the doubt in my own lovability. God and I were tighter than ever.

So. Fast forward, oh…four years from the previous miscarriage. And there–right there–after this miscarriage–I had an epiphany. And in my perfectly precious epiphany, I had the answer to this miscarriage and the last: I was being used. For a Purpose.

In my life, I had always turned toward grief and sadness. I had consumed and digested it. Most people can’t stand to feel those emotions, and they try everything they can to avoid them. Not me. I would say I sort of…wallowed…in them. I even, maybe, relished them. It previously felt like I couldn’t do anything else but to bathe in despair, very much aware of my sensitivities, and feeling damn special for them. And now, currently, with my second miscarriage down…the obvious reason for all of this time and energy spent in the wallowing was: to give me the resilience to process the legitimately difficult things that others couldn’t handle. I had built up some stamina for this stuff. I loved all of humanity, and yes – I would be their Martyr.

My heart and my ego did a little dance.

____________________________________________________________________________

You know how exciting it is to be infatuated with someone? Imagine that you’ve been pining after them for months, even years. Now imagine them showing up unexpectedly at your door to tell you that they’re in love with you…………………… Nowww imagine that you’re living in the moment right before that’s about to happen.

That was my continuous state of being for a few manic days. In between seducing my husband and making major online purchases, I kept thinking about Superbloom. I knew that wherever she was, she was already trying to find me.

In the hours between, life went on. I fantasized about Superbloom over and over. And I did detailed research on how to get pregnant as quickly as possible, ordering a thousand supplements and charting all of the things like a mad woman. A mad woman who was expecting…

miscarriage.

Photo by Omer Salom on Unsplash

Previous–>1…a crack in my universe. Next—>3…off the cusp.

4…anthony.

3…off the cusp.

2…epiphanies.