Intact

October 26, 2019

Haley and I are back in New York City. It’s Haley’s bachelorette weekend and she and I have driven from DC up to New York for a short but fun weekend. On the drive up, we listen to a Malcolm Gladwell podcast episode on law schools and talk through the findings it proposed before switching over to the new Taylor Swift Lover album discuss it animatedly. I’m a terrible navigator and am even worse when I’m passionately asserting my opinion on relatively mundane topics, so Haley’s a little concerned we’ll make it there all right.

But we do, and I’ve been a focused GPS observer, so we pull up to the hotel right around check-in time and unload our bags. We’ve made it in early enough to relax at the hotel before we get dolled up and hit the town!

It’s just the two of us and we’re meeting Haley’s soon-to-be-sister-in-law who lives in New York City for dinner in an hour. We push play on our favorite Charlie Puth playlist that we created on our last trip to New York City together two years earlier. We actually saw Charlie Puth in concert about a year ago and now we reminisce and laugh at how we stood at an outdoor concert venue, in the rain, during the middle of the summer, watching this too-attainable celebrity sing his overly sexualized songs while we were surrounded by nine-year-old girls and their indulging parents, wondering why in the world we expected anything different. Haley’s reminding me that I went into that concert thinking, “oh my goodness, what if I meet my celebrity crush,” and left thinking, “ya know, I’m good.” We feel young and free and put on our finishing touches then walk down to the lobby to call a Lyft.

We’re soon with Haley’s almost sister-in-law eating dinner at a chic restaurant in the Lower East Side rehashing our Taylor Swift album review. Shannon has strong opinions and honestly, I’m here for it. We’re finished not too long later and walk the few blocks to a comedy club where we’ve got tickets for a show. Shannon’s a big fan of comedy too, actually interned at a late-night talk show, and I think went to Second City? So it’s a fun night and made even more laughable by the fact that one of the comics gives me his card as we’re leaving and says he’ll be in DC in two weeks for a show – if we want to see him then. Haley promises we’ll go and I pull her out the door before she promises I’ll call him too.

We spend the rest of the evening going to speakeasy’s and hole-in-the-wall restaurants with Shannon, accidentally wandered into a private apartment building and were escorted out by the doorman, and then tried to intentionally wander into a private park, but 100% did not make it into that. Shannon breaks off around midnight and Haley and I finish our night getting McDonald’s near our hotel and taking it to go at 2:00am.

The next morning, we put on the Harry Potter-themed bachelorette t-shirts Shannon and I had gotten off Etsy and walk to get bagels for breakfast. We’re walking through Times Square where we’d been those couple of years before, and I’m hit by how different Haley and I both are now. It’s been such a short time in some ways, but over a year of counseling for me and two years in this wonderful, healing relationship for Haley and we feel…different.

We’ve got front-row tickets to the Boy Band Brunch put on by the Boy Band Experience in a couple of hours, but until then, Haley wants to walk through Central Park, telling me about its magic, and I’m a fan of parks, so walk that way but stop to get something warm to drink first. 

Soon I’m sitting on a bench in the shade of the Central Park trees. Haley sits to my left. I’m holding a hot chocolate and sipping it in the cool September morning. We’ve stopped our walk to rest on this bench and watch a starting softball game as well as passing strangers. We spike barbs of trash talk at the players who can’t hear us and chuckle to ourselves at our clever insults. We chat about our fun the previous night and again run through the comics that performed at the show we saw. Haley tells me we are going to see the comic who gave me his card and it’s non-negotiable. He’s performing at one of our favorite dive bar comedy spots and her fiancé will come with us. We laugh again about our t-shirts and sip our craft hot beverages.

We sit in companionable silence each pleasantly running through our own thoughts. I’ve got a smile on my face even though you can’t see it on my lips. I’m sitting here and I start to focus in on this feeling within me. Foreign, but far from unpleasant, I feel a kind of knitting together within the region of my ribs. I feel the settling of a general wholeness across my body. I feel….something I can’t quite pinpoint. I don’t chase to name it, just allow it to roam. This is something I don’t want to scare away by overthought and analysis. This is something I simply want to feel. So I welcome it and leave it be. It stays an entire day and I feel grateful for something I can’t name.

The Boy Band Brunch is incredible and will remain one of my favorite memories from that weekend. All too soon Haley and I are saying goodbye to Shannon and picking up the car from the parking garage before we head out from New York City once again. Haley remarks my navigating has gotten better and we get back to DC without a hitch. It’s a memorable weekend and a settling one.

I’m walking to work and it’s a couple of days later. The brick-laid sidewalk I walk along is as historic as the city I live in. The trees arching overhead form a covering that is both picturesque and practical. There’s a wood and wrought iron bench every fifteen feet or so and they’re inviting me in to sit and think, but I nod to them a promise I’ll be back and I keep walking in to work. I’m contemplating the merits of picking up a cup of tea on my way when my previously unnamed feeling joins me once again. Something deep within the core of me shifting, melding.

Curious, I try to put a name to it once again. I come up empty. It isn’t something I’ve felt before and can thus recall. Instead, I focus on the change itself. I feel, at this time, like my mind, soul, body, and spirit are all….one. Are all together. I feel no division, feel no divide.

I test out the word integrated. I look it up on my phone while walking, “To combine one thing with another so that they become a whole.” No, not quite.

I take a few more steps at a pace that would make any DCer angry with sidewalk rage, and I wade further into the feeling.

I feel like I am neither running from anything or striving for something. I feel present in this moment. I feel complete and completely here. But complete isn’t the right word either.

God, tell me, what is it?

Oh.

Intact.

I feel intact.

Intact, “not damaged or impaired in any way.” Intact.

I breathe a calm sigh.

It’s the right word.

I didn’t know I wasn’t damaged. I wasn’t impaired. I wasn’t destroyed. I wasn’t fragmented. I wasn’t in pieces. I wasn’t less than. I wasn’t unvaluable. I wasn’t incomplete. I wasn’t irreconcilable. I wasn’t. I wasn’t.

I keep thinking I’ve been working so hard to be fixed again. I’ve been striving toward wholeness. I’ve been trying to be repaired from the wreckage the brain surgery and subsequent illnesses wrought.

I’ve been so wrong.

I’ve got nothing to fix, nothing to repair. I was never damaged. I was never impaired.

I thought, for so long, that God was putting me back together. Trying to reintegrate that which the brain surgery destroyed. That the brain surgery was a bomb exploding and pieces of me were fragmented, strewn across a very wide landscape. I thought I was going through the process of collecting these pieces, sifting through the wreckage, picking them up one by one, and matching them together like ceramics. Hoping, praying, the final result wasn’t missing too many parts and that I resembled something like I did before. That I’d be recognizable.

I’ve been so wrong.

I’m not broken. I’m not in pieces. There’s nothing to reintegrate.

I am one piece. I am intact. There’s nothing to go back to. For longer than the brain surgery I’ve been a block of granite with beauty inside it, crying out to be uncovered. There’s something within it to be brought out. I don’t know what the final product is, and I won’t for a long time, hopefully. But I can see the end result taking shape. I can see form beginning to come to the formless block of stone, and it’s been uncomfortable and painful for a long time as huge chunks have been chipped away all at once. But maybe we’re getting into a round of detailing, or priming for the next round of chiseling away at the block of granite. Regardless of the direction of the sculptor, the one truth I do know is that the brain surgery wasn’t a bomb. Wasn’t destructive or destroying, but was freeing, revealing what the block of stone could be, will be.

I am who I am supposed to be where I’m supposed to be at this time and that’s a beautiful thing.

Because I’m intact.

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