When this story started, I was a somewhat newly single twenty-something living in Washington Heights who loved going to the gym. I had an amazing group of people in my life that supported me in every decision, even (especially) the ones involving tequila. And I had a rude cat who hated everyone except me, plus also kind of hated me too. 

That’s about where the similarities end between the LB that started this blog, and the one who is writing it now. She had long blonde hair, two tattoos, wore heels every day, spent Saturdays getting happy drunk to celebrate anything, which could turn to sloppy drunk real quick if she started to feel feelings. She was confident (mostly), and she was happy (mostly), and she was content to be single (mostly). She also opened her heart up too quickly too many times and allowed herself to be blinded by a fantasy of what would make her happy, truly. Lately I’ve been reading through the old stories here and I remember each one so well: every moment, every date, every brush with love, every single heartbreak, and even a solid 70-odd percent of the poor decisions. 

She is me and I am Her but somehow we are different. The person who started this blog is like a Russian nesting doll inside me now, one I can uncover when confronted with lessons we learned by writing our experiences down here. In a dark moment in February, when it felt my life was finally coming together and simultaneously falling apart, I went back and read the very first post on this blog, and I found her waiting for me. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘we’ve been through this before. You made it through before, too.’ That moment felt really powerful, and I think it’s drawn me away from really committing to this space since. Much as I’ve still been writing, it’s not the way it once was, carefully planned and edited stories to say it right. Any part of me on here lately has been rushed, a stolen moment of weakness on another late subway ride, and it hasn’t accurately reflected my current life for a while now. The Chronicle is something that my old life needed but my new life doesn’t; it’s come around full-circle in just a few short years, and that’s why I think it’s time for me to walk away.

My story isn’t over; it’s still only barely begun. But this story, I think, is over. All of the dates, the love, the heartbreak and every single bad decision is immortalized on here for myself and for each of you in the times you think no one will understand what you’re going through. I’ve been through most of it, one way or another, and  not only have I come out the other side, but I’ve thrived. The life I’m living now is so different from the life that started The Chronicle. It’s not just different, either, it’s better. It’s the best life I can imagine for myself, better than anything these pages could have dreamt on that dreary February where I logged onto WordPress for the first time and gave this page my initials.

In the worst decisions, in the lowest of times, I will be grateful forever that I had a place to organize my thoughts, my emotions. I will remember each rooftop brunch and each terrible day at work and every ounce of hope in each of these pages. Hope for something bigger than a job that made me not-quite happy, hope for a relationship where they would treat me more than mostly well, hope for a happiness I knew existed but hadn’t yet grasped. 

It was the best decision to start this blog, which started with the worst decision. It’s now the right decision to let this story go.

I love you all so much. 

xo,

Lauren

Breakups are scary and sad. They take a long time to move past; it’s like a death, you lose someone you love. How does life go on after experiencing that with another person? As you can tell by the blog tone for the past few months, that question has been plaguing me. 

Where I share the best parts of my life across other social media, I share the scariest parts here. The most vulnerable moments, the ones where I’m on the subway and it’s been another 15-hour day and I’m so exhausted that the only way to assemble the thoughts in my head is to get them out, and quickly. That’s where the blog comes in, to get the bad stuff out in a way that I can make sense of it, given how little time I have to pay attention to it otherwise.

This weekend, every moment, was perfect. Saturday I spent the day with my new squad, my work squad, and I took a look at my life and I almost had to start laughing. Because Friday night had reminded me why I chose this life in the first place, and Saturday reminded me how many times I’d make that same choice if given the option. Friday night made me feel lighter, and Saturday made me feel solid. I am whole and unbroken; I am exactly where I am supposed to be. 

They say when you’ve found the One, you know. It’s like a deep sense of intuition, or maybe a beam of energy that changes you. On set yesterday, standing with my hair and makeup professionally done waiting my turn in front of the camera, I felt the same sense in the pit of my abdomen I felt the day I walked into the studio for the first time. I felt the same calm that I feel surrounded by those people, and as they cheered me on and took photos, I felt home. Because they also say when it’s Over, you know. I knew enough to walk away twice. After this weekend I know enough to walk away for good. 

I wake up, sunshine slowly streaming through the window in the bedroom, our bedroom, pat the cat on the head and roll over to give him a kiss on the cheek lightly, not enough to wake him yet, but he still stirs and puts his hand on my back to keep me there for another moment. I oblige, snuggled into his chest, and breathe into his embrace, smiling when he starts to snore again. I escape with practiced ease and tiptoe to the kitchen, a bigger one than either of us had last, and pour water into the coffeemaker. I run through emails on my phone, another project awaits my approval before we share with clients on our weekly call this morning. I sigh and tap at my phone until the coffee sputters that it’s ready, and move into the living room to catch up on work before going into the office.

He rises slowly, “good morning baby,” and hops into the shower, while I finish up work and put on breakfast, eggs probably, and sigh as I look at my yoga mat in the corner of the room. It’s been a while since I practiced, but I’m teaching a class next week at the office so I need to do that tonight. I make a mental note to stop at the lululemon next to my office, my favorite one in the city, to pick up some new gear as motivation to get back to practice. I’ve been working late nights gearing up for an approval and I can feel my stiff body craving the stretch. He emerges, and I drink in the sight of him in the morning, wet hair, nicks from the safety razor. Living together hasn’t been easy but it’s nice to wake up next to him every day.

Eventually I make my way to the closet for a dress and summer heels, apply a thin layer of makeup and stare wistfully at my sneakers; my side has been acting up again and the heels aren’t helping. We eat breakfast and talk about the plans for the day, we may stop out further in Queens for dinner to see friends or maybe we’ll make some of the Trader Joe’s bags taking up space in the freezer. Eventually we leave, he walks to his car and I walk to the subway, “have a good day baby, I love you” and we part. There’s an easy elegance in the routine of everyday life together.

I step into the office after a short commute, drop my lunch in the fridge and say hi to reception before settling in at my desk overlooking the Hudson. There’s that moment just before you open your inbox where you know it’s the final moment of peace before the day really begins, and that’s where I like to be. Deep breath, email opens, and day begins. There are emails, spreadsheets, meetings, peppered with office gossip and checking the kitchen to see if lunch arrived yet. One of the girls I work with is talking about her marathon training, how she wakes up at 430 every morning to run and I shudder. 430am?! That sounds miserable, even for working out. The day concludes eventually, long after it’s supposed to, and I shuffle with the rest of the herd onto a crowded subway, wishing for a seat but telling myself not to take one. “You sit down all day,” I chastise, “it won’t kill you to stand for a half hour.” Once I’m home I’m exhausted, and the yoga mat stares at me again across the apartment, our apartment, through a layer of dust. Tomorrow, I tell myself. Tomorrow I’ll practice. 

I sit with a glass of wine to wait for him to come home so we can decide dinner once and for all, and turn on Chromecast to finish watching The Office for the umpteenth time. It’s the series finale, I know I’m going to cry again, and then Pam tells Jim she sold their house so they could move to Austin and he could follow his dream. Austin, I think, I could have been there by now. If the original plan went down, I would be teaching yoga in Austin full time. No more meetings and endless emails, no more inbox anxiety and late nights that take away any joy from restarting my practice. If all went according to plan, I would be following a dream, but if that plan worked out I wouldn’t have him. 

As if on cue, he walks inside and I smile, he’s worth it. I’m okay waiting for a few years to follow that dream, and maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe the late nights will get better and I won’t dread going to work so much; maybe I’ll find the time to practice again or maybe I’ll try running again, anything to get moving. It’s only a few years, I tell myself, and even though we may have a house and kids and other obligations he’ll support me when I finally decide to leave and give this yoga thing a go. He loves me, I tell myself, he’ll understand how important this is to me. He knows how badly I want this, and we’ll figure it out together.

We decide to go out for dinner and as he hands me the keys to lock up I get a glimpse of the mirror and I freeze. In a second I see myself but she isn’t me; her hair multicolored and pulled back into braids, no makeup, and she looks strong and more importantly she looks happy. She looks happier than I’ve ever seen myself before, ever knew I could be, even. I stare for another second and I see my reflection who is not me; she doesn’t work in PR anymore, she’s a personal trainer?? and she has a smile I’ve never seen on myself, except maybe the night I met him. I’m paralyzed, looking at her, because she looks so, so happy. “You okay?” he asks me, scaring me out of my daydream and I see her stare at him with a look of wonder and deep sadness and I blink and it’s just me again in the mirror. I’m fine, I tell him, and brush it off, Just a daydream. I’m not that girl. She can’t exist, not within our life.

We go to dinner and we come home. He plays a video game for a bit while I get ready for bed first like I always do, and once I’m snuggled in bed he brushes his teeth and makes his way next to me. “Good night baby,” and a kiss and we roll onto our sides of the bed. The next day we’re going to wake up and do it all over again, I’ll wake up first and I’ll tell myself tomorrow I’ll practice yoga and we’ll make dinner from Trader Joe’s before we fall asleep. Before I can fall asleep though, the other Me pops into my head. She looks so happy at me but she looked so sadly at him. I look at him sleeping and can’t imagine a life without him, no matter the cost. As I fall asleep I dream of multicolored hair and what it would be like to be a personal trainer. I wake up the next day and do it all over again.

You need to step it up.

This is something I’ve heard before. I’ve heard it across many aspects of my life in my almost-29 years and every time I hear it I already know it’s coming. Words like that aren’t surprise words; you don’t hear words like that without already knowing that you can do better than what you’re producing. When I heard them last week I was almost expecting to hear them, watching myself through the cloud of haze that engulfed me in that quarter moon. It doesn’t make them any easier to hear, expecting them, but it does mean I’d had time to prepare how exactly I’m going to meet and exceed that comment.

Step it up. Do more. Do better. Themes that permeate the life I create for myself; I push myself to do more constantly. Stay distracted. Falling into boredom isn’t an option I give myself anymore because when I’m not occupied with something then I’m engulfed in the past so completely that I can’t get out. This time last year we were planning Memorial Day, this time last year I was still reeling from my friends moving and he wouldn’t say three words, eight letters. But I can’t fall down that rabbit hole at all, and that’s why I stay distracted; the problem is I need to distract myself so heavily that I get stuck again, somewhere in the in-between, and as I try to stay distracted to get ahead, I end up falling behind. Step it up, L.

There’s a song by Lord Huron we all know from binge-watching 13 Reasons Why that I can’t stop listening to. I mean that figuratively, in that every time I turn my phone on I put that song on Spotify. And then I add it to my queue so I can listen to it twice more immediately, before moving on. Once I listened to it on repeat for 45 minutes straight and I loved every one of them. It feels personal, like songs are supposed to, and I can’t tell if I listen to it to help me heal or allow me stay hurt. “Take me back to the night we met,” he croons, and I’m instantly transported to dancing in sequin pants with a stranger who had never felt more familiar, refusing a kiss on the dance floor and then waking up in a tangle of bedsheets, hangover dulled by the sensation that something powerful had happened. “I had all and then most of you, some and now none of you.”

Step it up, L. It’s time to turn the song off and look forward; you can’t live in a moment alone anymore. Step it up, L, it’s time to shake off the layer of dust you’ve allowed to settle over your brain while you’ve been distracting the rest of yourself with work. Step it up, L, you can’t be the best if you don’t try your best. Dust off. Shake off. Move forward. Step it up. Step it up.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, haunted by the ghost of you.”

Take me back. Or take me forward. I’m stuck in the cloud. I can’t step anywhere.

“Breathe, L.”

My boss was quite literally holding me up as I couldn’t catch my breath, suspended upside down on a pull-up bar, trying to focus on keeping shoulders protracted, extended and engaged as hell and freaking out about this new maneuver. Skin the Cat, it’s called, and it looks cool but it’s scary as hell. I hadn’t done it before and I was super excited when my boss pushed me into trying it with his help. I’d wanted to try it for a while, and it was fun, the second and third time around. The first one though? I had to bail early and he had to give me a minute to take a deep breath, the aftershock of pure adrenaline and anxiety still coursing through me like a drug. I’d never been so terrified in a single moment. I’d never wanted to figure something out more.

Things are moving forward and the part of me that’s holding onto what’s missing is changing. It’s not necessarily going away or getting bigger, it’s just… evolving. I’m in limbo, the in-between, where I’m longing for what was but I wouldn’t change what is. I miss my old life, where I had weekends and someone to come home to, aside from the cat. I love my life exactly how it is, where I’m happiest working and home is the perfect, quiet sanctuary from everyone else’s energy, if only for a little while.

No part of me wonders what life would be like if I’d stayed in PR. The purpose I have in my life and myself now is so clear and straightforward it amazes me it took so long to find it. But when I think about what needed to change for this life to manifest, I find myself searching for the happy medium between where my life was and where it is. There is no happy medium though, because the happy part in the medium is the one thing I can’t change. And yet? I don’t know if I want it to change either. I want to move forward and move on, and in a lot of ways I’m doing exactly that. I also don’t want to move forward at all, because moving forward means letting go, and I’m not ready for that yet. Back to purgatory; back to the in-between.

Breathe, L. I gave Skin the Cat another go this week, and I took more time to focus on the breath, inhaling into the exhilaration and exhaling out anxiety, finding a moment of stillness to enjoy in between the two. Something I tell people who ask about meditating is to picture the inhale as the future, and the exhale as the past, and focus on finding that small pause between exhaling and inhaling – find the present, and stay there. Find the moment where you breathe into exhilaration and exhale anxiety. It’s the present, the in-between. It’s the middle ground between things that can’t coexist. That’s where I’m existing these days. I can’t change the past and I can’t predict the future. I’d make every decision exactly the same. I’m fucking terrified for what that means. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to make a choice to move forward or go back. So at least for now I’m going to exist in between. 

The scene: its Sunday night and the last of the hangover from the night before has faded, though that’s more due to the two beers that accompanied dinner rather than time. I see LB on a subway platform; she’s playing solitaire on her phone with an expression that looks like casual indifference to an outsider, but she’s hiding something. There’s a determination to her indifferent look, she’s trying just a little too hard to appear both casual and expressionless. She waits for the train patiently to take her from Brooklyn back home. Everything about her is patient and expressionless and collected. She is an unassuming stranger on a subway platform to everyone around her, except for me. 

I am standing in front of her on the pebbled yellow tiles like a rebel and I am screaming.

I am what she hides. I am the one she hides from. She suppresses everything into the black cavity in her chest and that is where I thrive; I am the part that feeds on every emotion and doesn’t let them fade away. I am standing on a subway platform and I am screaming, hysterical, my feet stomp and I remember how good it feels to collapse into myself and feel everything all at once. I am crying, hiccups puncture each sob and there are tears staining my good leggings and I don’t even notice. She keeps her eyes on her phone, methodically tapping the cards into place.

She doesn’t try to run from me, or beat me back into the dark place. She waits for the train patiently, and waits on the train patiently once it finally arrives. People around us are also methodically tapping phones, and there’s a general malaise to the energy, that heaviness that comes on a Sunday night. Neither she nor I know what that’s like anymore, that heavy sadness at the end of a weekend; we work every day and look forward to it even more. I stop screaming long enough to breathe into that space and shrink a little as I remember that the only reason I’m here is so we don’t ever feel that heavy energy for ourselves again. 

It’s a long train ride and by the time we get off in the Heights, I’m calmer. That black numbness that is my normal resting state starts to take over and I can feel us merging back into the LB that we’ve become these days. We stop wondering if he got the card that Friday and whether he’s really okay. The black hole where I emerge like a beast becomes a sanctuary for both of us; I can swim in her suppressed emotions and she can exist, and smile, and keep going.

We make it up the stairs and into the apartment, and take a deep breath into the comfort of home. I watch her put the keys away when they fall on the anchor doormat. She halts on the way down as the anchor reflects in her pupils, and before I can step in to save her she crumples onto that doormat again. I watch her breath, ragged and slow, and she counts to five with each exhale. She calls for me, looking for the sweet release of those screams she heard earlier, “come back,” she pleads. “I just need one hour. I just need 100 tears. I just need to feel and then you can go home.”

I enable. We cry. Tomorrow she’ll wake up, make breakfast and go to work and love every minute. But tonight we hold each other and we mourn. Just one hour. Maybe this time really will be the last one.

I collapsed as I walked into the door.

It was a familiar feeling but entirely different. The last time this happened, I fell to the ground in relief. Four years ago I laid on a different carpet, surrounded by white walls, and cried for sweet relief and mourning; there was a part of me that was changed forever but it was ready to move forward. This time I crumpled onto my anchor doormat before I could even get the door closed behind me, and I felt a part of me ripping apart. As I’m writing this I’m two very quick whiskeys deep, just enough to numb any sense of feeling so I can walk to bed and sleep before I realize what just happened.

I have missed blogging so much, but I haven’t been able to write anything. I’ve tried a few times in the past few weeks, but every time I started to write it felt wrong. The sunny picture on social media has had clouds for a while, and every time I started to write I couldn’t come up with words. Acknowledging the clouds made them feel too real. Not acknowledging them felt disingenuous. So I said nothing, waiting for things to make sense again, so sure that they would.

I can’t even write that much now, it seems. You see, I’m writing this just minutes after I collapsed as I walked into the door. Just minutes after I left the same fight and the same argument and just minutes after I realized something: I’ve already made the Worst Decision. I sat in a car tonight listening to the same fight and I realized I’d been here before. I’m not an adult I don’t think but I am also not 25 anymore. I know better than to repeat past mistakes.

Now I’m listening to Adele and I’m going to schedule this post to publish in the morning so I can sober up, both physically and emotionally. Except every time I start to sober up emotionally I need to de-sober physically, lest I feel the full force of what just happened. I can’t think straight right now and that’s probably a good thing. Otherwise I’d think about how everything just changed and it feels like my soul is ripping apart.

Oh readers. If I could explain the last few months, across all aspects of my life, you wouldn’t believe me. The past week in particular has been especially different, to say the least.

I’ve been keeping journals since my teens, but the past 2 years in particular I’ve been almost religious about chronicling my life. After yoga, the journals became an outlet to follow the moon phases, and in particular, writing Intentions, Hopes and Wishes at the new moon. The hippie philosophy goes that intentions set at a new moon will manifest at the full moon six months later.

The past week, month, three months have been nothing but challenging. Tonight I wrote on the final page of a journal that took me 54 weeks to complete. It’s the close of a chapter, like when I set intentions in my Little Red Notebook the day before the night we met. Closing that notebook, the one that took me 7 years to fill, felt like an ending. Closing this one, that started 3 days after we met, feels like a beginning.

Last night was a full moon and the toughest of nights in a long time. I wrote tonight with a passion and a fervor and when I finally emerged enough to think clearly, I decided to see what my intentions were from six months ago. Just to see where these silly journaling habits got me. And that’s the entry below. The intentions and hopes and wishes that I set on July 5, 2016. They made me cry to read tonight. How strange to be comforted by your own words.

5 July 16

I’m a day late on intentions for the new moon. Today is my second Tuesday between jobs and it’s been a wonderfully weird few weeks.

A and I had our first fight this weekend. Typical, it happened after drinking and we hashed it out before falling asleep so details are fuzzy. It had been simmering all weekend though – his frustration at my optimism and my frustration at his pessimism. He drives me crazy sometimes and I couldn’t even kiss him because I have a stupid cold sore. Life is funny sometimes like that. Fortunately it turns out we fight like adults. We spent the fourth together doing nothing in his apartment and that was pretty wonderful.

I’m not sure what I’m hoping for come January. Or even in the next month. Hell, the next week. I’m so shocked 2016 is halfway over but when I look back at all that’s happened, it makes sense. I’m terrified, slightly, for what’s to come. The good terrified, I think. Changes this year have been so positive, if huge. I hope that continues. 

So here we go:

I INTEND:

• To get my newsletter up and running
• To teach at a Lululemon store!
• To support A through all his health issues, even if/when he’s pessimistic

I HOPE:

• A can use some of my optimism and we find him an awesome new hobby
• [My last PR company] is the right decision for my PR/professional future
• My injuries improve and/or I find out what’s causing the pain.

I WISH

• More people come to my monthly classes!
• A and I find the perfect apartment for us and Harlow to save money for a house
• To spend the rest of my life with that perfect, pessimistic, hilarious, sweet, kind, funny, and handsome boyfriend I am blessed to have love me, and would be lucky to have love me for the rest of our days.

xo! LB