Saudade

The past two months have been a tumult. I spent all of June in a deep funk, with bi-weekly sobbing melt-downs and anxiety-laced dreams. My emotional state improved in July, getting trapped in the vortex of self-pity less frequently, symptoms of happiness persisting through the weeks. Now it's August, and I'm getting my mojo back if it kills me.

Reflecting on it (obsessing about it) - reading over my text messages and private Facebook notes, written to him, of course, when I was missing him - I see that I had already predicted our demise, almost from the beginning. My letters ache with pleas for more affection, for deeper connection. I read the signs of desperation, the knowing that he would never lust for me as I did for him. But the universe was responding to my request for a do-over, a re-igniting of my divine spark, and I accepted him as I would a gag birthday gift: not what I was hoping for, but given out of love, a shiny and delightful plaything all the same.

I miss him. Some moments I choke on the absence of him. It was such a whirlwind of music and laughter, life without him is a let-down. Banal. Pedestrian. Loving that manic-depressive was exhilarating. Everyone and everything else is boring by comparison.

We had an involuntary attraction, polar opposites pulled to each other like magnets. There were many, many happy days when he shined his light on me. I knew in my bones he was in love with me and I was euphoric. I was ageless and time stood still. Then the clouds rolled in and he would withdraw and shut me out. I became miserable, certain that he would realize the folly of our attachment, that he'd break the connection and I'd never feel him near me again.

The Brazilians have a word that intimately describes the feeling: saudade. It means missing someone or something, but there's an added sentiment of existential yearning that goes beyond the physical or emotional. Pronounced "Sow-DA-gee," Wikipedia says of saudade:

"A Portuguese and Galician word that has no direct translation in English . . . it describes a deep emotional state of nostalgia or deeply melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will never return . . . In fact, one can have saudade of someone whom one is with, but have some feeling of loss towards the past or the future." 

I feel saudade for my divine spark. I called him my divine spark, although I recognize intellectually that it resides within me, that he just brought the lighter. But, emotionally, I know that loving connections are the torch that lights a meaningful life.

My cup has been filled to the brim with loving connections. And I don't mean to sound like an ingrate: I love and appreciate my friends and all the beautiful people who have shared my life's journey; I don't trivialize or take for granted my friendships. But, while there have been many men who claimed to love me, no man has gone out of his way for me or made an effort to cultivate a partnership. No man has stepped up for me.

Ever.

And letting go of yet another lover feels like letting go of the chance of love ever shining on me again.