Michelle Underwood

The year between Casey and Marc is like one of those nightmares you know isn’t real, but from which you can’t wake, and even if you do, you have to stay awake because you know falling asleep means falling back into the same house of horrors, but you’re so tired that maybe staying awake is just as bad and you know that the memory of the fear you felt in your dreams will permeate the rest of your day anyway. So there’s no good option – sleeping, waking – it’s all the same. It’s all equally terrifying.

I think I lost myself in that nightmare year.

There were moments, blips in time, when I’d feel like me again – the girls would hit a milestone or I’d laugh with my sisters – but mostly, I floated through the days hoping to feel something like normalcy. In between COVID, moving back home, and getting a job in my old school district, I started dating again. It was a way to distract myself, an attempt to claw my way out of the dark abyss. Plus it’s a well-known fact that I’ve never been very good at being alone; it’s not that I can’t do it, I just prefer not to. So I opened the apps and started to swipe and eventually I met someone. 

Things felt good for a minute, but like really good, like too good. Being with him was electric – not in the we have chemistry kind of way, but rather in the I’m having a panic attack kind of way. I didn’t realize this immediately of course – that would have been too easy, too self-aware, and far too healthy. Anytime I was with him, my head swam, my skin buzzed, and my fingers tingled. I had to use alcohol to bring me down. After our dates, I’d crash, crying myself to sleep, spiraling into shame, depression, guilt, and remorse. I was a walking disaster of a human being who was so high on adrenaline that I couldn’t regulate my emotions, but it took me a few months to understand that. Once I did, I tried to break it off, but he’d decided he was IN THIS, so instead of breaking up, we took a step back in the vague way people do when they don’t want to be with someone but they’re too afraid to hurt them. 

It was strange how much this guy liked me because who did he actually like? A grief-stricken widow? A woman going through the motions? Someone who drank to get through a date? A human husk in desperate need of therapy? I wasn’t a person – I was an idea of a person. And all he saw was his idea of the person he wanted me to be. The whole thing was pure chaos and everything felt wrong. I’d cry, he’d try to comfort me. I’d pull away, he’d drag me back. He’d touch me, I’d recoil. It was push and pull and push and pull and always the buzzing under my skin, in my ears, at my fingertips. Everything was always so damn serious and emotional and heavy. I hated it and I hated him and I hated myself. 

But mostly, I hated that I didn’t even recognize the me that I hated. Who even was I?

After one particularly disastrous night, I ended things for good. Then I took a beat and a breath and decided to give up on dating altogether for a bit. I bought a house and made a plan to move forward – just me and the girls.

And I started to feel better.

But a month went by and, not to be dramatic, but the loneliness settled in the cracks of my soul and a gaping abyss threatened to swallow me whole. I knew I didn’t want to be alone forever, so I opened the apps again. As I swiped on disappointment after disappointment, investing tiny pieces of myself into conversations that didn’t matter and wouldn’t go anywhere, the sense of wrongness returned and this time I decided not just to give up on dating, but to declare that I was giving up on it. Declaring it was important, it meant that I was serious, that I wanted to be held accountable. I even considered posting it to social media where everyone could be a part of that with me. Even if the people who loved me gave me grace, I knew I could count on the internet trolls to hold me accountable.

Instead I told my sister and her then-boyfriend that I was done with dating apps, done with dating, that it was ridiculous and I was just going to move into my house and be alone with my kids forever and ever. Apparently, I didn’t sound very convincing because the boyfriend’s response was that he had a friend, the nicest guy in all the land with whom women everywhere fell magically in love, who had a truck and could help me move. The implication was clear, so I asked to see a picture of this nice guy. He texted Nice Guy while he looked for a picture and Nice Guy responded, “Is she into guys with dad bods?”

I laughed because yes, absolutely and dear Lord, please let him be real life funny too. We spent the next week talking, texting, and sending snaps all day, every day. I laughed constantly. The day Marc showed up to help me move was the first time we met in person. I waited on the lawn of my parents’ house as he pulled up in his truck. I soothed my nerves with jokes as this handsome man, a dad with a dad bod, walked towards me. I offered him home brew in a tulip glass, a reference to our first conversation. He’d brought housewarming gifts – all nods to inside jokes we’d made over the last week. It was easy and fun, and the only buzz I felt was from the beers we drank.

He came back two days later. And another day after that. We saw each other a few times a week and laughed every day. In the midst of this, we both worked full time and I settled into a routine with the girls. I never cried when he left. There was no guilt or shame or worry. A month into our relationship, the four of us got iced in together. We barely knew each other and Charley hated everyone, but he made the girls fancy fruit plates and played Teen Beach Movie and sat outside by the fire pit, beer in hand, at 11 am with me and it all somehow worked. It was easy and light and happy. And I knew then that this was it, that he was it. 

I probably told him so then, knowing I risked scaring him off, but I’ve never been very good at pretending I don’t feel the things I do. I’ve never understood the point of not being honest and real and loving people with everything you have. I’ve never understood the point of not fully living. And it was at that moment I realized that I’d spent the last year doing exactly that – I’d been existing, but I hadn’t been living. 

It wasn’t him exactly that brought me back to life. Not on his own. It was the smack in the face realization that I’d spent the last year missing out – on my girls, on my family, on a full life, on myself. So while he didn’t fill the void himself, he didn’t bring me back – he was the catalyst. 

So in March, I said “I do” and vowed forever (with a much better understanding of sickness and health, better or worse) and I promised myself I’d spend every day of the rest of my life really, truly living.