Dating : What It Looks Like One Year After My Divorce

The first abandoned part asking to come home showed up as a lady and her dog running around the parking lot just outside the window of my new apartment in the city.

Her dog was a husky, just like the two dogs I used to have, and I remembered what it was like being her.

Tenderness bloomed in my heart and a lump grew in my throat. My feet were rooted to the tile, eyes locked on the lady and her dog; my apartment window a movie screen playing the life I thought I was going to live.

Not too long ago I was that lady.

Now, I am the lady standing in the window of my new apartment, which is also my new boyfriend’s new apartment, and it all just felt so new and so different in the face of how comfortable the life I used to live was.

I knew who I was back then.

I don’t have that luxury anymore. I feel like I’m somewhere in between who I used to be and who I will become.

But it’s not that I wished I could go back to the comfort of my old life — I loved the new life I was building. I was now with a man that treated me better than I thought was possible. I was moving into the city after a lifetime of living in the suburbs, something I’d always wanted to do.

But even still, my eyes were glued to the lady and her husky keeping warm in the parking lot, and I felt the pinprick of a part of myself I’d abandoned knocking on the door of my heart.

This part felt like the grief that comes with the loss of knowing who I am.

My identity was in transition, and in order to get through the stage of letting go of my old identity, I had to leave this grief behind.

But now, here she was. She’d traveled from that old life to this new one. Her ghost stood behind me, a gentle hand on my shoulder, whispering,

“Is there room for me here, too, in this new life of ours?”

I pretended not to hear her.