Someone Belonging to Someone

Today I started listening to the book The Power of Vulnerability by Brene Brown. I think I've posted her Ted Talk on the same subject before -- it's totally worth the 20 minutes it takes to watch it. But the book is really interesting too, and it really got me thinking. She talks a lot about worthiness, and people who believe they are worthy of love and belonging.

Listening to it, I realized the incongruence of me feeling like I am someone who is worthy of love and belonging, and staying in a relationship where I feel, at the moment at least, pushed away.

It feels like the opposite of belonging - - just ask the Bee Gees:

I know how I feel
Lonely in the black of night
There can be no love for me now
Nobody listens when the words ain't right
And you get into someone else
It's hard for me to know
Who's lovin' who
And where do I stand
What did I do it all for
There's no one I could love more
I did it for your heart alone
All that I try to be growin' inside to me
I can be strong if you're there

And there is someone belonging to someone
And I got no one belonging to me
I live in a world where the face of an angel
is all that a fool can see
You got the power to find me whenever I'm lost
Where are you? Who are we?

These are questions that I would've thought we had the answers to by now, but a particularly stressful time in my New Englander's life has brought the "where are you" question back to the forefront:

I believe in time
Can eat away a heart of stone
And baby if I leave you too late
It's just a feather and the bird has flown
It's colder when the fire dies
With all the trouble I'm in if I lose you too

Then what is my life
If I don't wanna go through
Anything without you
Couldn't be life at all
I could be lyin' on
You are the only one
We didn't make it by chance
And there is someone
belonging to someone
And I got no one belonging to me
I'm caught in a world on
the edge of tomorrow
It's all that a fool can find
I don't belong in the arms
of a love that is lost
Nowhere to cry
There must be something we
can say my love
Something except goodbye

I thought and hoped that he could find a way to lean on me, but it isn't working out that way. Some of my friends have talked about the good things that can come from hitting rock bottom. I know that to be true from my own experience, but so far, it ain't producing anything good for us, which leaves me feeling like maybe there isn't an us after all:

And there is someone belonging to someone
And I got no one belonging to me

To Love Somebody

Woke up with this song in my head this morning, thanks to the soundtrack of 50/50, a movie that was apparently in my Netflix queue because it arrived at my door on Saturday morning:

There's a light
A certain kind of light
That never shone on me
I want my life to be lived with you
Lived with you
There's a way everybody say
To do each and every little thing
But what good does it bring
If I ain't got you, ain't got ?

You don't know what it's like, baby
You don't know what it's like
To love somebody
To love somebody
To love somebody
The way I love you

I don't remember putting it in the queue, but after my kids went back to their Dad's yesterday, I went to yoga and then came home, made some dinner, and fired up the flick. I was exhausted, so sitting on the couch was about all I had in me, and the movie wasn't half bad -- it was about a young person being diagnosed with cancer and being given 50/50 odds of survival -- but it was also funny in the way that any movie with Seth Rogen is funny.

Midway through the film, a friend called that I hadn't talked to in a while, one who knows intimately what I'm going through right now. We talked for about an hour, and I did some more emoting, and then I watched the rest of the movie.

And I missed him. A lot. I missed his body on my couch, I missed being able to see the movie through his eyes as well as my own, and I missed him when the movie ended and I crawled into my bed, where a part of him still seems to lie:

In my brain
I see your face again
I know my frame of mind
You ain't got to be so blind
And I'm blind, so very blind
Cause I'm a man, can't you see
What I am
I live and I breathe for you
But what good does it do
If I ain't got you, ain't got ?

Other than assigning me the wrong gender, those lyrics pretty much speak of where I am right now. And rather than trying to speed through this phase, I'm just going to let myself be in it.

Even with all the pain, I never lose sight of the fact that it was with him that I really, truly learned what it is like to love somebody. I'm so grateful these lyrics don't apply to me:

You don't know what it's like, baby
You don't know what it's like
To love somebody
To love somebody
To love somebody
The way I love you

I went through a phase, when he decided to leave, where I questioned whether he loved me in that way -- maybe he didn't know what it was like, and if he did, he'd be staying? That might be a more convenient explanation, but it doesn't square with my experience of our love. In order to be as powerful as ours, I reckon the love has to be mutual...