He doesn't want to see me cry.

Yesterday morning I had another session of EMDR. EMDR is something that is powerful but heavy. I need at least 24 hours to recover after each session. So, when I was doing EMDR, Ivan's face at Newark Airport came back to me, and this time it was very clear. He watched me walk away with a smile but in his eyes, there was profound sadness. He knew that was the last time we'd see each other, but I didn't. He didn't tell me what he knew and instead he said all those sweet things to comfort me because he didn't want to see me cry.

When the image of his face at the airport showed up in my EMDR, my tears just kept rolling down. Two years after our break up, I didn't cry at all and simply couldn't shed a single tear. When we were together, there was one time he asked me impatiently, "why do you cry so much?" That really stays with me. It made me feel that my tears were a mistake, an emotional burden to others, but obviously at this point in my life with so much healing, my tears are just who I am. I was born highly sensitive and I cry easily out of sadness or joy. Perhaps to Ivan, and to most people in the world actually, my tears require them to face their own tears, tears that they have buried deep and that is destabilizing for them, so they choose to walk away from me.

In my last letter to Gen, I asked him what was the last movie that made him cry and he told me it was "Your Name", a Japanese anime. After I tucked the kids in bed, I watched that movie on Apple TV and totally cried my eyes out. The theme and storyline are absolutely deep--it's about timing, fate, serendipity, amnesia, and soul resonance. In the story the two people got to know each other by swapping their souls from time to time, and what that shows is two people who got to know each other very deeply, intuitively, but as they swapped souls their timing was also unaligned; they actually swapped souls at different points of time. What made me cry the most was when Taki tried so hard to find Mitsuha even though he didn't have any information of her and after all the life-altering efforts, the two people still lost their memory of each other but both of them still knew they were looking for something. That hit me really hard because once you've experienced soul resonance you can't fill the void with substitutes or distractions. No matter how hard you try to numb yourself, numb the ache in the void, you just know it's there. The memory of soul resonance is imprinted in your body and you'd only feel truly relaxed and safe once you've found it, even if you have forgotten the person, like in the end Taki and Mitsuha still forgot each other's name and how they knew each other.

Have I truly experienced that? Yes, but only in fragments, with Ivan, Jes, Ken, Eric, and Alex, but only Ivan and I were in a daylight structure while everyone else was in a liminal twilight space and therefore my feeling of safety and protection were the strongest when I was with Ivan.

So speaking of Ivan, I found his IG with photography of birds--it's definitely professional level now, like some of the other wildlife photographers I follow. After I started to follow his IG, some messages popped up. It turned out he had messaged me a few times on IG over the past 5 years with the first one in Jan 2020, during COVID. He said, "the world is ending. I think it's fair to ask if you and your family are ok." I find that quite funny, but fit the paranoia we all had at that time. Given how many people died in his country from COVID and how densely populated his country is, he could have died too. I'm glad he didn't die.

I replied to his messages on IG telling him that I didn't receive them until now and it's probably because of some privacy settings, but he never got back to me. He never replied to my last email either. My therapists said maybe he didn't know what to say or that he just had one moment where his life had a crack. I don't know which one to go with or maybe I can be done trying to figure that out. I think he just doesn't want to see me cry.

Then I also wondered: if I had known that was the last time I'd see him in my life back in 2009, would I have done anything differently? If I could travel back in time and tell the unhealed 23-year-old me something, I think I'd say, "Miss that flight. Go get a hotel room and have sex with Ivan. If you don't do it now, the only sex you'll have in the rest of your life is gonna be awful. That man couldn't even locate your vagina and didn't know how to have sex. You'd have sex a few times in the rest of your life only because you are trying to get pregnant. Once you've got pregnant, you'd never want to touch that man again."

Haha, the problem was, would the 23-year-old me listen to the 39-year-old me?

Today is my last day of my 9-day vacation. The kids' grandparents have taken them out for an outing, and I am going for a scenic drive along the coast by myself for the rest of the day. I want to be embraced by the mountains, the ocean breeze, the humid air before I go back to work tomorrow.