After the Cage Opened

A small note on life, the universe, and everything — with apologies to Douglas Adams, from whom that kind of title can never be fully stolen, only borrowed badly and with affection.

I have been thinking lately that one of the best things I ever did was stop being in relationships.

Not because love is a mistake. It is not. We are human, after all: tender, needy, ridiculous little creatures, built with a terrible hunger to be seen, touched, chosen, forgiven. To want someone beside you is not weakness. It is almost biology wearing a poem as a coat.

My last girlfriend was not a bad person. Quite the opposite. She was generous, intelligent, capable of brightness. There were many good things in her, and I would be dishonest if I pretended otherwise.

But she was also very much herself.

And I say that carefully, because the uglier word would be selfish, and selfish is too crude, too final, too easy. It would make her smaller than she was. Still, there are facts, and facts do not become less true because we dress them politely.

The fact is this: while I was with her, I had crises. Panic attacks. Those absurd moments when the body becomes a locked room, when breath turns into an enemy, when your own mind stands over you like a stranger with a knife.

And since we ended, I have not felt that terror again.

I do not know whether it was her, or the relationship, or me inside the relationship. Perhaps the cause was not a person, but a condition: the feeling of being trapped. Of belonging somewhere without being completely received there. Of being committed to something that did not feel devoted in return.

And when devotion is absent, even freedom begins to feel like a prison.

Leaving was good for me. I think it was good for her too. By then, whatever we had called love had already gone quiet. Maybe in me first, maybe in her. Maybe in both of us at once, in that silent way things die before anyone has the courage to pronounce them dead.

So what remained was freedom.

I became free.

She became free.

And since then: no panic. No terror. No anxiety clawing its way through my chest in the middle of an ordinary day.

Only silence.

And, for once, silence has been kind.