Falling In Love Again.

I have spent so much life learning to love this person. Through the awkward stage of adolescence, through the party days of youth, into being a 'responsible' adult. I loved them through all the mistakes, the missteps, the success, and the joy. I fell in love as we grew up and we had become intimately acquainted. I had spent the better part of my life learning and loving them. And in the moment I found out I lost my fiancé in the accident, I lost the girl I loved. The girl I had spent all this time discovering. She died with Rene.

It has just occurred to me, this is who I am now. I am not ever going to go back to who I was. Pre accident Chelsea is just a girl I once knew. I guess I hadn't really thought about it, but on some level I believed I would somehow go back to who I was. However, lately I have had subtle nudges to understand, this is who I am and I will never be who I was. I guess I had thought at some point I would go ‘back to normal’. I look the same but no part of me feels the same. The continuity of myself has been broken.

I am starting to see and trying to accept who I am now. There are turning points in everyone's life. Moments that change us so profoundly we can trace the transformation throughout our lifetime. Say the birth of a child, loss of a job, a divorce, or big move. This experience particularly jarring, it has changed every aspect of me and my life. Everything I was planning, creating, becoming; gone. The wife to an amazing man, the mother of his child, a family therapist, happy, just to name a few.

So I am getting acquainted with this person. How do I learn to love her? She is basically a stranger to me, but I guess as I learn her I could love her. To get to know her, what she believes because God knows her outlook on life isn't what it was. Allow her to learn to trust the world, herself, and mystery again. To watch her as she explores this new reality. While she is not who I thought I would live with for the rest of my life, maybe she will be a delight.

Falling in love again. She has potential, a lot more wise to the world, she will love more fiercely than ever before. I am learning her dreams, since the ones I had been excited for do not exist anymore. I will learn how she likes to spend her time, what she values, and who her friends are. This is not the girl I originally loved, however I am open to the possibility that her and I will be closer than ever before. She has a tender heart, a little beat up right now, but I can see a fight in her that I hadn’t known. I see a deep sadness in her, but I also see a glimmer of appreciation for life that few have. Like she knows a secret. While she is wounded from a circumstance so fucked up she can't fully understand it yet, I see her growing rapidly from these teachings. There is very little of the girl I once loved left in her, but there are endless possibilities for our connection as she relearns her way around her world. It is undeniable this girl is more complex, but she knows she can handle anything and in that she is brave.