#23 - Sunsets and separations
On losing love
Hey everyone,
This is my most personal essay yet.
Grounded in the deep reckoning that is separation, this essay pulls upon some of my favourite imagery in Rio and Pema Chodron’s generous gift: When Things Fall Apart.
Blessings e beijos do… Medellín!
Jodi
In the south zone of Rio, the sun divides her time with an equality that seems deliberate. To rise, she picks a 4.5km beach anchored by a military fortress on one end and a 2 billion-year-old plump mound of granite and quartz – affectionately called Sugar Loaf Mountain – on the other. It is here, as grannies and grandpas power walk in swim gear and sneakers and surfers with flowy hair race by on their e-bikes, where she wakes.
Oozing over the Atlantic ocean, she spills brilliant shades of orange, yellow, red, and pink. Quickly, her slight arch swells into a full bend of possibility. Then she pops out of the ocean.
People stop in their tracks; some say prayers.
Others slow their jog and smile at whoever happens to be beside them.
Waves crash.
By the time we get there, on a late Sunday morning earlier this year, her illumination is complete. The sun's morphed into an indiscernible locus, a master puppeteer with rays as strings so diffuse it's hard to tell whether the day she’s conducting is by design or simply the way things are.
“Where would you like to sit?” I say, meandering through beach chairs weighed down by relaxing bodies, toddlers waddling with plastic buckets overflowing with ocean, and every kind of vendor imaginable balancing towering bouquets of bikinis and trays of fresh fruit caipirinhas to carts of corn and coolers with ice, cold beer.
Emboldened with the earnestness of a Canadian escaping minus whatever below, my mom directs us: “as close to the water as possible!”
And so we land where dissolving waves melt into the sand. Marcos whistles over help to set up our digs. We drop our belongings, and my gaze extends up and across the ocean where the sun snaps sparkles on wave after rolling wave.
Looking back now, on how that morning started, it feels painfully poetic. What would come to be my last day in Rio (for now, at least) beamed with all the allure that initially captured my heart over three years ago.
In mid-January, I booked a flight back to Canada to see my Grannie. But I also booked a one-way ticket because my marriage was on the rocks.
I – we – thought this time apart, to focus on my Grannie and family, might help. Maybe I’d see some friends in Canada or Costa Rica after. Maybe I’d do my own thing, meandering back on my own time. I never thought this time apart wouldn't eventually lead me back to Rio, back to icing sugar sand, swimming classes, juicy cocktails, cute but psycho Granola 🐶, and most painful of all, the man I loved who brought me here in the first place.
Unlike falling in love, deciding to end a relationship is quite the deliberation. You have history to draw upon: a battery of scenarios to extrapolate into the future and analyze hypothetical trade-offs. After however many lazy Sundays cuddled on the couch and spats picking up rental cars to deepening disappointment and anxiety about our “family model” (our therapist’s words, not mine), I ached to figure out: what's workable and what's not?
Of the things that aren't workable, what’s tolerable? For how long?
What timeline is reasonable when I'm – we're? – trying to hold on to forever?
For me, the dizzying deliberation was a vexing trip around what I need and what I'm getting, discovering deltas where there weren't before. Deltas I couldn't have foreseen because I've changed and so has he.
Now we're here.
If marriage is about reciprocity, as I like to think it is, the calculus is qualitative. It’s also on a timeline that is somewhere between when you first met, this moment, and forever. In this way, patience and presence were primary themes in our marriage.
Now, they are the primary themes in our separation.
We couldn't find a tolerable balance between the two, tried as we did. Again and again and again. I needed things to change. He needed time to get there. And so, after waiting and waiting and Zoom therapy sessions and curdling anxiety tucking itself between us in bed at night, eventually, I just needed now to be better than it was.
Or at least I think so. This is all still pretty fresh. Our separation story is like new Play Dough: there in form, but not in shape.
This is how I’m thinking about it now, less than two months after another yet fight turned into a text: "I prefer we divorce" turned into two weeks of silence turned into two suitcases on their way from Rio to Ottawa.
Turned into me with my carry-on and backpack on an indefinite trip around the world because I don't have my home, or Granola, or my life as I knew and loved it.
This is how I’m thinking about it now.
But I know stories change, and I can't see why this wouldn't apply here.
“I went through a door and when I went to go back out, it was gone. There was no way to get back to the life I had led. Everything had changed. Whatever opens us is never as important as what it opens” – Mark Nepo
Like budding relationships, I’m learning separations are a process. As much as I initially wanted to rush this (as my family and girlfriends can attest to), I’ve learned it’s impossible. There are too many things true all at once:
This can't work now.
We have to go our own ways.
We will always be family.
I miss you.
I miss what I wanted us to be and who we once were.
I don't want any of this.
Life keeps going.
I’m excited.
I’m heartbroken.
I'm grateful for everything.
I'm sorry for everything.
I love you.
I'm not happy anymore.
If the good life is about learning to let go of judgment, as I like to believe it is, we have to learn how to make space for all things. We have to learn how to not know.
To help guide me through this transition, I finally read Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart. Of all the passages I highlighted, I so loved this one:
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy."
And this humbling reminder:
“When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don’t know what’s really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don’t know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all.”
These passages and her gorgeous book in general reminded me of the power of acceptance. Reminded me to trust that blessings come out of pain and loss, and pain and loss from the most beautiful moments of our lives. Whether by design or simply the way things are, life is just like that.
In the south zone of Rio, the sun divides her time with an equality that seems deliberate. To set, she dips into another 5km inlet with the famous Arpoador on one end and two striking mountains, "Dois Irmãos"1, on the other. In the winter, she falls behind the cuddled-up mountains, casting a warm glow across the beach as couples clink cocktail glasses and soccer balls bounce up and down as friends play altinha. In the summer she melts into the ocean galvanizing thousands of hands into cascading rounds of applause.
Some people whistle.
Others whisper, "que coisa mais linda2".
And parents wrap their arms around their children's shoulders nudging a cosmic comfort suggesting there is room here for everything. Especially, for love and sunsets.
This translates into “Two Brothers”, the iconic mountains that frame the backdrop of Ipanema and Leblon.
This one is a bit trickier to translate. The most direct would probably be “most beautiful thing” or “what beauty”, but “coisa mais linda” connotes astonishment and wonder in a way that doesn’t really translate into English.
Pra sempre ❤️