Under the Bridge

This song has been on repeat on the internal ipod since my drive home from the airport on Thursday evening:

Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner
Sometimes I feel like my only friend
Is the city I live in, the city of angels
Lonely as I am, together we cry

Building on the theme of my last post, the lonely feeling followed me home from Philly, and in some ways has only amplified since I got back. On Friday morning I started a cleanse, which basically means that for a period of time, I do a little experiment to see what happens when I don't reach for the creature comforts of chocolate, refined flour or sugar, and booze to soothe any discomforts that arise.

And in general, I'm not particularly comfortable at the moment. I feel sadness and frustration surrounding my lovelife. I thought I had found a partner, and not just any partner, the partner. Sure, there are things that needed to be worked out, but I really had the sense that we could work them out together. And we did, to some degree, and then we realized that we were both, to too great an extent, fulfilling unconscious patterns rather than staying focused on the partnership we both had a desire to be a part of. Ok, I thought. So we recalibrate. We adjust. We communicate. We get some help.

But something different happened. We started to disappear into I need this and I need this and in the process, we lost our ability to make decisions about our future together. The question of what that future would look like became a question of whether we would be together at all.

I don't know where to go from here, and so, as Anthony Kiedis suggests:

I drive on her streets 'cause she's my companion
I walk through her hills 'cause she knows who I am
She sees my good deeds and she kisses me windy
Well, I never worry, now that is a lie

In other words, I go about my life here in Madison, a place in which, for many years, I struggled to find peace. The only time I felt I had really chosen to live here was in college -- after that, it always seemed like a series of decisions based on something other than place that kept me in this quite lovely city that, despite its charm, doesn't particularly resonate for me in the way other places do.

What I learned, when I really dove into the feeling of wanting to leave this place, was that I just wasn't comfortable in my own skin. In this way, remaining in Madison has served for me like a cleanse -- rather than reaching for another place to fill me up, I've stayed put, and learned to fill myself up.

At least, mostly. The part of me that wants a partner, well, I'm not sure how long she's going to be able to hang out in this in between place she finds herself in right now:

Oh, no, no, no, yeah yeah
Love me, I say, yeah yeah