It is my birthday today and my left eye is all but swollen shut.

I have told myself this is a gift. I am becoming Óðinn. The loss of an eye in exchange for wisdom is a deal I would make if I was given the chance. Waking up this morning, the first proper full day after returning from the high North—the first full day of real life after the realm of ice and moss— I have decided it means something.

Otherwise it seems lame and rather unfortunate to leave it to biology and chaos: a random infection.

But I am a storyteller.
A storymaker.

I am becoming wise.

Photograph by Nathan Thomas

My husband traveled with me and as true voyagers, we have come back changed.

Our first night in Reykjavik we had a horrible argument. I don’t know that I could articulate what it was about other than we have both been hurt and sometimes it feels like we ache too much to help the other. So instead we take opposing corners of a room and weep on our own, in our own ways. But there was something about the days that followed that night. In some ways I hope it was the zenith of our apartness and now we can settle and make something calmer, closer, connected in ways I prevented and he cautiously circled.

Having chosen each other, loving each other we had fallen into the trap of greatly repeated mistakes; the paradox of not wanting to hurt the other, of avoiding truths, causing pain, worse and enduring. We have avoided being authentic and accurate with our hearts because we both wished to please the other. However, in doing so we have both ended up saying other than we feel, we have ruined chances to be who we really are with each other. We have assumed what the other could handle of ourselves and hidden away the rest.

We are aware of it now and once you see the pattern it makes it easy to predict (harder to change). And yet, we are choosing different. We are choosing to be ourselves. We believe that will keep us together.

But we understand, there is a risk here. We may say opposites now. We may say things at odds. We may hurt and cause hurt, even after all this time of avoiding it, we may. And we see it and we are asking the truth to sit in our marriage with us now. To be partners with us.

This makes me brave and dare I say, wise.
Him too.

I trust in us. Even if we do not please our other, we now know the people pleasing wasn’t pleasing anyone and we don’t want to be pleased— we want to be loved. To be known. We want so much more depth to our life. We want the real. We want each other, but only if it's real.

I will no longer guess what of me he can handle. The trust of love is to let him see me and choose me— or not. This vulnerability is the deepest of myself I can give and I am reaching out to someone who I think will reach back, but this time when I reach out it will be with my ungloved hand, I will feel for the warmth of his fingers and I will allow him to reach for me or pull back, and maybe we will live a real life.

It is what we say we want. And what we say is what we know to be true, not what we think should be.

We are wiser now.

We are walking towards love, a new kind.

The lasting kind.

Photograph by Nathan Thomas