There was a time, more than a year ago, when I was living in New Zealand and spending long, lonely afternoons walking up and down the misplaced hills of Wellington with one iPod earbud plugged into one ear, doggedly teaching myself two new lessons about who I was in the world. To protect myself from the silence of a day when I spoke to not one other person, in defense against the 18-hour gap in time between my brother and my parents and my dog, as armor against the humorless absurdity of 4-degree nights in my bedroom, I convinced myself, I subconsciously trained my head and my heart to believe two decisive truths:
1. I would never fall in love.
2. I would never make another friend.
I couldn’t imagine either ever happening again with any marked success and I couldn’t imagine surviving another failed attempt.
In a strange, backward way of the human subconscious, these dismal beliefs eased my loneliness and heartache. I came to know these things so deeply that I was hardly aware of them, but it was a comfort that, when I felt unloved or unwanted or rejected or abandoned, I didn’t have to feel lost. It was just meant to be that way.
As the invulnerable cowgirl, loneliness became independence. Longing became indifference. The absence of another made way for a sharper presence of self. I became a girl who chewed on her lower lip not to stave off tears, but to present a fierce autonomy that was both seductive and unattainable. No one could touch me.
In the months after I returned home and then started my last year at school, I slowly unlearned my defense mechanisms, but I have not forgotten them, my once indelible truths. I double-check my choices against them sometimes. I’m sad that what remains are not the beautiful, sparkling daggers of defiant independence, but a silhouette of the brave cowgirl I once was.
It seemed that once I was finally aware of the defenses I had built like a turret around myself, the most potent strength that I held up there in a hundred-foot tower drained away and left me only with the bittersweet memory of what it felt like it need no one, to trust no one, to take a dark kind of pleasure in long afternoons spent walking up and down the misplaced hills of Wellington, New Zealand all alone.
Now, when I need that pleasure, I only have the idea of what it felt like to love only myself and to be loved by only myself. When I reach out to feel for the turrets, my hand passes through the vulnerability of a wall that no longer exists. I walk on vulnerable like it’s a fine line between potential and pain, and I think about the ups and the downs of every hill on every street in Wellington. I’ve unlearned my ‘never’ rules. Now I’m learning again to take the ups with the downs, or the downs with the ups. I’m learning to remember the strength of the dark cowgirl and pair her with someone who became a stranger to me for awhile, who I buried in anger and fear. I am still the open, laughing friend. I am still the candid, innocent girl. The severity of her counterpart has ebbed with time, but she won’t ever vanish for good. I have found them both. They are both parts of this whole.
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