Written by Amber Garibay
HE WRITES.
I want to date you short term..
MY REPLY.
Great! Let’s get married!!!
SOME OTHER GUY WRITES.
I can’t believe that awesome message I sent you last month didn’t even get a “thanks but no thanks.” Really?
TO HIM I SAID NOTHING
(I have no idea what he’s talking about)
THIS DUDE OVER HERE THINKS HE’S FUNNY
Wow!! You have been single for a long time.
You must be picky?
What the f*ck do I even say to that bullsh*t and why in the hell is my online dating profile still up? I think about taking it down all the time, my finger hovers and every once in awhile I actually do it.
DELETE
and then… and then I get the warning message, “Are you sure? This will be permanent.” It’s like the freaking computer is taunting me, “You are going to be single PERMANENTLY Amber Garibay.”
I thought about that today. I thought about that very real possibility. I am now sitting in Pint’s and Quarts my favorite Irish Pub owned by an Asian man. Maybe I will be.
I’m smiling. Single sounds easy and I’ve got a sh*t ton of work to do if I am going to make this life of mine matter for more than my own selfish fancy. I want to help people discover their own power in health and I do want someone special to hold close to my heart, closer than any gift. That guy is out there somewhere but I started something two years ago, something I call my life’s work and when I die it will be remembered nearly as much as my smile which is already legendary. I am an island.
I wasn’t supposed to be single. My story was not written that way; it began with a family of three, with two little dogs and a goldfish. Ours was a romance that builds forever. Seventeen years was a beautiful beginning to which I imagined no end save death.
HIM, HER, US, HUSBAND, DAUGHTER, WIFE=FAMILY
I’ve only ever imagined two futures for my life, both ending in death, one of which sounded like “us” finishing the race as a team withered by a lifetime together. Then we crashed. I am really sorry about that. I saw a wall up ahead never realizing that it marked the end until I was standing on the other side of new beginnings. I am over here and he is over there. Our daughter is somewhere in the middle of that.
I am single after nearly two decades of US. I am alone.
I looked at it that way once, I am alone, just as there was a time that I couldn’t imagine any future for my life other than death. I didn’t imagine my wedding day when I was a young girl, and there was no dress to make me feel like a princess. I wasn’t going to live that long. I remember holding up arms the size of bone to gaze at tubes stained with my blood. I wondered when I did. I wondered about grown-ups, parents, and doctors. ”Why are they fighting so hard to keep me here when the earth clearly wants me back. Asthmatic, if I were meant to live surely I would be allowed air. The in-between was purgatory.”
I guess that is how I would describe it, being single is like being stuck in between all possibility and sometimes it feels like suffocating. I feel like I am late and waiting all at once until I am strangled by unknown. The discomfort feels far better than I remember love. Love was more than a sickness. It wasn’t fair. I remember that from 1995. I remember writing a soldier from my hospital bed and wanting nothing more than to protect him from the hurt he was handing me. I didn’t want him to regret how he treated my death. He was in the field on maneuvers when I had the attack.
“He’s never going to see me again… I am going to die before he gets home.” I had that thought as my medical team whispered things like intubation. “He doesn’t even care…” was the despair that crashed my heart after he hung up on me cold, without an “I love you,” or “good-bye.” I laid there after, tears steaming down my face, wishing the phone would ring so our ending could be different than what it was. “He doesn’t love you Amber.” The phone didn’t ring again but that answer did.
Years later, after we were married, he admitted that he couldn’t. He couldn’t love me because that meant giving what he didn’t have. “Don’t you think I wanted to be there for you? I did. I wanted to be there for you Amber but I couldn’t be. Do you even know how much it hurt to hear you on the phone like that, gasping and wheezing, knowing that there was nothing I could do. The military wouldn’t allow me to come see you because we weren’t married. I was pissed. I wasn’t thinking about hurting you when I hung up the phone. I was thinking about everything I couldn’t be while wishing I was more.”
I understood because that’s the thing about life. Sometimes we aren’t the best and sometimes we aren’t the strongest. Sometimes we can’t be a person to be proud of, and sometimes life won’t allow us more than alone.
I am single because I have been alone and I can handle it. My life is full because I know I don’t have to be.
