The World Is Bound With Secret Knots.
28 Days - A Story Of Love and Loss, Of Grief and Gratitude, And Of The Ways We Are Bound By Love
Dearest reader,
What follows is an almost decade-old story of a weekend that quite entirely and literally kept me here and alive on this earth.
I have written about this weekend many times , but never the specifics of this part in full, nor have I shared what it meant to me.
Right now, more than ever before, it feels important to reach deep to write the stories that have shaped what I know to be true of love. The ways my lived experience has formed the ways I show up for love in the world. I want to write you the stories that explain how a woman like me still believes in extraordinary love. I hope, maybe, they help you believe too.
And yes, dear readers, this story is a true story, as much as any story can ever be. More than true, you see, because it is real and it was important and it changed everything. The very best stories always do.
xo,
jlb.
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We sat cross-legged, facing each other on the scarred hardwood floor of the bougie-meets-boho Santa Monica shop where she worked.
I didn’t know her. Or I hadn’t until moments before. But there was a moment of eye contact, an honest question followed by an honest answer. Then there we were, no longer strangers, just broken heart meeting broken heart over a tattered straw basket filled with tiny silver rings.
To the outside world I looked like I was simply digging through a basket of inexpensive trinkets with the help of the store employee, trying to choose one or two to adorn my fingers. In reality, I was doing everything I could to keep my shattered heart from tumbling out of my chest and into the open palms she had gently laid face up in her lap.
Her break was older than mine. Worn down by time and the elements of a life that must keep on keeping on. Her heart, less wobbly than my own, no longer threatened to fall out of her rib cage all ragged and pulpy, into the hands of near-strangers who asked honest questions. But the fault lines were still fresh enough to be visible through her clothing, on the surface of her skin, and just behind her wide blue eyes. I could see it clearly, that still healing heart, all tremulous pulse and the tough new skin scar tissue of rebirth.
Aren’t we miraculous, I thought, for how we survive.
28 months, she told me. That is how long he had loved her.
28 blissful, near-perfect months.
The day after the abrupt end she opened her closet and carefully took out the floral dress he had given her, back when he still spoke his love with certainty, an indelible promise he swore wouldn’t dare break itself.
The dress was beautiful, she sighed, deep red roses twisted with bright green vines. Gossamer thin fabric that skimmed her curves and fell to the middle of her thighs. Sweet and sexy and perfect. Just like he knew it would be when he chose it. Just like her, he said. Just like their love.
Once upon a time, she told me quietly, he stood behind her as she gazed in the mirror. They were getting ready to go out for the evening, and she couldn’t quite reach the zipper of that dress. His hand moved slowly from the curve of her waist to the center of her back as he zipped that perfect dress for her, bending to kiss her neck as his hand traced tenderly its way up her spine.
She paused her retelling with a sharp inhale, disappearing a bit into the visceral memory, becoming somehow less solid before me as her body returned to that night, to his hands, to all that longing. After a moment she shivered, and I watched her come back, to her body, to the present, and to the story.
He paused then, she said, and met her eyes in the mirror. With a small smile, and just as tenderly—even though they were meant to be leaving mere minutes later—his hand reversed its path down to the base of her spine with an almost agonizing slowness.
The dress slipped from her shoulders. She watched as it drifted, slow motion, to the floor, pooling around her bare feet, so that it looked, for a moment, as if she was standing in the middle of an English garden.
They missed their dinner reservations that evening. And their movie plans, and the dancing they were meant to do with friends later that night. Back then, which wasn’t so very long ago as time is measured when you are not picking up the pieces of your shattered self, it was so entirely clear that they would have an infinity of dinners and movies and dancing.
All that mattered then was the insatiable hunger of their hearts and skin, and the endless, eternal need. That night the dress watched from the floor as the darkness grew deeper and everything in the room turned golden and felt like worship. He promised her an infinity of forevers. She offered her own vow in return. They fell asleep then, tucked into the safety of their perfect love. Nobody even thought to pick the dress up off the floor.
Her voice shifted away from wistful reminiscing, took on a stronger edge. After it was done, his hunger for her gone, his love written in disappearing ink, she was bereft. A primal, wailing, animal of a thing who only tasted grief.
Her voice wavered then, fell silent. We were still sitting there, on the wood floor, hushed voices, locked eyes. Honest hearts. Somehow, I knew, this story would help save me. I put my hand on hers then, leaned in. "Please", I said, and she continued.
She knew if she was to survive, she would need to do something on purpose. So for 28 days, one day for each month of their loving, she took that dress from her closet and folded it carefully into a small canvas bag.
Day after day, in the golden hour right before sunset, she biked with that dress to the pounding surf of the Pacific. There she built herself a small altar of ocean stones, a circle of rocks on the sand, a platform on which she could light a small fire.
For 28 days she struck a match. For 28 days she spoke a specific offering of gratitude for what she had learned and gained and been given, both in the loving and in the losing. For 28 days, she tore a strip from the dress and surrendered it to the flame.
She did this even on the days she didn’t want to. Even on the days when everything in her pulsed with the relentless need to drive to his door and beg him for a different sort of forever. Even on the days she wanted to throw some random clothes into a suitcase and run away to start a whole new life. One where she could willfully forget the sound of his laughter and the way he liked his coffee with honey, and how, from the very first night, their bodies puzzle-pieced perfectly together in her double bed. Even on the days when she wanted to scream anger and frustration and nothing in her felt like offering the slightest sliver of gratitude. Even on the very worst days, perhaps especially on the very worst days, she offered a thank you to the love, to the story, to the fire that burned into the darkening night.
Each night she used teeth, and bare hands, and the resolve one only finds in the center of the break to fragment what was once whole. Even though she never would have been able to articulate it at the time something in her knew that, somewhere in tearing apart, she’d find something new she could use to knit herself back together.
Sometimes the dress ripped effortlessly and the whole ritual only took a few minutes. On other days the fabric seemed reluctant to give way and she tore nails and hurt her own teeth trying to get a piece to relinquish itself. Sometimes the fragments of that dress seemed to take the shape of memories, one piece looked like France (he swore he would take her to Paris one day). Another, if you were creative, was the silhouette of his golden retriever. This one, somehow, made her cry the hardest.
Once, before she was able to stop herself, she put a small piece of that dress in her mouth and swallowed it whole. That night she dreamed, as it swirled into her belly, that the twisted vines on the fabric sent down roots. They extended through her feet and wound around her bed frame, pushing blooms up through her open mouth until they spilled out all over the ceiling. In the dream she awoke to find that her heartache had consumed her, or perhaps she it, and that overnight she had transformed into a living version of the dress itself, forever bound to the bed where she had last come undone inside the haven of his arms.
But no matter what, for 28 days she held a scrap of that dress in her hands and poured her entire broken heart into the torn fabric. Soaked it with the brine of her tears and filled it with the stories she couldn’t bear to forget, along with the ones she would have given anything to have lived outside of her own fairytale daydreams. She spoke them all out loud right there on the beach for anyone who cared to listen, and sometimes someone did. Small curious children, a collection of random seagulls, a young man from Sweden busking his way across the country with a mandolin. He held her hand for a full half hour and made her feel just a little less alone.
Every night, with the deepest of intention, she said thank you. To that man. To the love. To herself. To the specifics of their loving and—as the 28 days wore on and the wisdom of it all worked its way through her bones—even to the specifics of their breaking. This was was, of course, the start of a different becoming, of something new that was in the process of being born, though this was the very hardest part for her to know.
Each night, when the tearing and the speaking and the gratitude and the reckoning were done, she gifted that torn scrap of dress—the roses and vines and unrelenting unmet hope of it all—to the flames and let her remaining tears fall into the fire. Some nights she would let those tears mingle with the ashes, dip her finger in the mixture and paint her own skin, transforming herself into a warrior of grief. A line on each cheek, one thick strip across her breastbone, a swirl down each arm. A single dot pressed firmly on her third eye, which she imagined a doorway, not to an alternate universe, but instead a direct line to landing all the way in the life she was now reluctantly living.
For 28 days she sat there, alone on the beach, as the sun exploded into a ball of gold and fell behind the horizon line. As the day deepened to night and the sky transformed from smoke to bruise to obsidian she felt her heart steady ever so slightly. As the stars slowly revealed themselves against the sky and the salt of her tears dried cold and tight on her skin she released a small piece of the grief. And when the fire had burned itself out and her breathing had settled deep enough in her belly that she felt ready, she walked to the ocean’s edge and offered the ashes of her dress and her love and her dreams to the sea.
28 days.
28 rough torn scraps of a once beloved dress.
28 offerings of gratitude for what was gifted from the portal of love and loss.
28 days of crying and bargaining and praying to the gods that live where the land meets the ocean and it all falls into mystery.
28 days of reliving the beauty of a love story even in the middle of all that pain.
And 28 days of releasing, surrendering, healing, and letting go.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
She told me the entire story then, in that finite moment of shared truth. And right there on that hardwood floor. Right there over that basket of cheap silver rings. Right there as my heart somehow kept beating in my own chest, I learned something new.
I learned that gratitude and grief need not be disparate or warring realities. I learned how they intertwine, no ending or beginning, just the complexity of being alive and human, made real by an experience that removes every last mask.
I learned that one can be broken by what is leaving while still offering a holy sort of thanks for what was given.
I learned that I could hold the loss of something dear with a devastating sort of tenderness, while still unceasingly, and with a profoundly fierce gentleness, continue to hold myself well.
I choose my rings, finally, and said goodbye to her. We hugged for one long, beautiful moment and she held my gaze with the tenderness of a beloved. Though I had not spoken a word, I believe she saw my whole story right then. She saw it and she held it well, just as I had held hers moments before.
I left the shop and continued on my way. Still broken. Still wishing for a different story than the one I was living. But changed inside. Wiser. Maybe stronger. With wisdom I knew I would carry into the wilds of whatever came next.
The next night, I drove myself up the coast. Stumbled down a cliff just as the fireball of a sun began its descent over the infinite sea. The air was bracing and thick with the smoke of some nearby fire. I spoke incantation then. I used a twisted piece of driftwood to draw a circle of protection in the sand and I trusted it to keep me safe. I sat in the center and wrote frantically in my journal.
What poured out was a letter of gratitude. A letter of thanks. A letter listing all that was earned and learned and gained and given in the short period I was able to love the woman I had lost. I scrawled the lines as quickly as I could, racing against the dipping sun and against the pounding of my own desperate, yearning heart. I wrote and cried and rocked my body until my hands cramped from cold and I was utterly spent.
I lit my own fire then, in the center of my circle in the sand. Tore the pages of my journal one by one, and gifted them to the flames. I watched them burn, word by word consumed by the heat, an offering to what was most true.
As the ashes of my offering cooled I gathered them, my own love letter to grief, with my bare hands. I walked to the ocean’s edge and bent over, plunging my hands into the frigid waters of late fall. I watched as the remnants of our story were carried away by the tide, knowing it was safe to let go.
Because, as it turns out, none of those words asked for a different reality.
None vilified her for what was done in the rough gash of the ending.
None of them attempted to name the story anything but what it was: An impossibly beautiful and impossibly brief love story. One that took forever and placed it gently back in my hands for a fragment of time that was, as it turned out, just long enough to change me entirely.
Every single word I wrote that day was a prayer of gratitude.
A prayer of letting go.
And a prayer, in the end, to the certain truth of my own return.
That night I met her again, the woman from the shop, in an underground bar a few blocks up from the ocean. There were stacks of old books and candles dripping down empty wine bottles. It was dark and warm and cozy, and there was a chalkboard on one long wall. Suddenly, mid-conversation, she got up and began to draw. Soon, a complex design of interwoven lines and curves and color took shape from the work of her hands. Eventually, she stepped back for a moment, looked at her creation, and leaned in again to write something in the center. When she was finally done I saw it there, in swirling cursive, seven simple words
‘the world is bound with secret knots’.
If you had seen her there that night, lost in the space of creation, you would have seen an artist throwing the entirety of herself into the making of a piece of art that likely wouldn’t even last the evening before being erased or rewritten. You would have had no sense of how much pain she had held and was still holding. You wouldn’t know about the love or the loss or the fire or the dress that had become one with the ocean.
We rarely do, of course, know the truth of the secret knots that bind those around us. But bound we are, to others, to the stories we hold, to the love of our hearts and the grief in our bones, to the truth of ourselves. And we are bound to the strangers we meet along the way who give us something we didn’t know we needed. The ones who meet us, alter something inside of us. In ways we couldn’t have anticipated but cannot imagine living without.
And I am forever bound to her. To that woman from the shop. To her story of 28 days and to the fragments of her dress that are now an inseparable part of the ocean itself. With the secret knot of a tender grief and shared story and fierce trust. And because of that binding, I can forever show up to meet the entrance and exit of love differently.
I spend a lot of my life unraveling knots, unbinding myself from that which holds me back. Loosening constraints and releasing the ties that limit. But there are some knots I tend to carefully. Some bindings I choose to maintain. These knots are a part of what holds me together, that tether the story of me to something far greater.
I never saw her again. Almost ten years later and can’t remember her face or her voice, though I have tried so very many times. But I remember her story. Her bravery. Her strength. Her resilience. Her offering to me that day, it was one of truth, ritual, and faith. A way to survive the leaving that comes, inevitability, from the risk of love. I remember that sometimes, 28 days can carry you from a space you think you will not survive into the mystery of what comes next.
And I remember what she taught me, that no matter how deep the pain, our healing is bound, irrevocably, with gratitude.
And with love, even love that tears us apart, even love that guts us with grief, there is always, always thanks to give.
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