Every morning when I open the gate, Damien is blocking the doorway with his entire body, a nonchalant boulder. The other tortoises eventually climb over him. He comes out when he’s ready; he’s old enough to operate on his own time.
I get it. Something shifted in me the year I turned 40 — a bone-deep, almost chemical unwillingness to move before I was ready. An end to the apologizing and accommodating. Go around me.
Most people don’t know that if you gently scratch a turtle’s shell with your fingertips, across its domed hump, something happens that the keepers call finching. The turtle rises up on its legs, almost hydraulically, extends its neck, and its whole body lifts toward the touch. As if to say: Yes, thank you, more please. It doesn’t lunge or race, just slowly rises to meet whatever feels good.
I had never once finched. I only knew how to lunge.
I collected beginnings the way some people collect debt: excitedly, quickly, with confidence that future me would sort it out. The hourslong phone calls, the feeling of being freshly known. I was exceptionally good at that. It was the long middle that got me: the laundry, the grocery lists, the fights, the distance between the life they had promised and the life they could actually offer.
It took me a while to understand that I wasn’t falling in love so much as falling in love with the falling. I was chasing something that dissolved when I caught it. Every time, I told myself the problem was the person. The right one, I believed, would sustain that free-fall. I was like the hare in the fable who loves running so much that she forgets there’s a finish line. All circles and speed and the sound of her own breathing.
I had stepped over so much of what love wasn’t that I had become fluent in its imitations: the weight of a relationship held together by momentum, how we stay because leaving requires admitting how long ago we should have left. I knew what it felt like to disappear by degrees: the opinions first, then the needs, then the preferences, then finally the instincts whispering, “Something is very wrong.” When I went looking for the self I had silenced, I found only a woman-shaped cutout where I used to be.
