Is this what they mean when they speak of “grace”?
A strange thing happened last night. I’d been puttering around doing my usual Friday night nothing, and was headed to the kitchen to fix myself a fancy (and late) dinner of tomato soup about 8:30, and I caught my reflection in the hall mirror. It was me.
It wasn’t the image that was striking; I don’t actually expect to see someone else in the mirror. It was how I felt. I felt like me. Not the me I’ve been lately, not even the me I was that morning. I felt like the me I was before A died. She was pretty cool; you would’ve liked her. I did.
The strange thing was that I felt content, confident, and reasonably pleased with the world and with who I am. I don’t really know where those feelings came from; they weren’t there an hour before. I did nothing out of the ordinary to trigger it. And truly, I pretty much gave up on feeling like that the day he died. I was sure I was irretrievably darkened and damaged, and could never be that girl again.
But for a little while tonight, I felt like the woman I remembered. I felt like the woman he would recognize as his love. It felt good. It wasn’t that I had forgotten that A had died; I never forget. But that’s what made it all the more amazing and unexpected. I was even comfortable, for the moment, with our relationship as it functions now. It lasted about an hour, and slowly dissipated for reasons as mysterious as its arrival in the first place. But if it’s possible for me to feel that way for an hour, it’s possible for me to feel that way again. There is incalculable hope in that hour.