“With my music, and for whoever listens to it, I think I’m not the best singer in the world at all. But no one else can sing my songs like me.”
~ Adele
With very few exception, I dislike covers of Adele’s songs.
Often, the focus is on trying to out-sing her, to somehow prove how overrated she is by how simple the notes are to sing. While the results vary, the most common one is they are unsuccessful. Lots of shouting, lots of “Adele, who” posturing, lots of going not much farther than the social media post.
She is the example I use in life of no one being able to tell your story like you can. And nowhere is this most evident than in the attempts to sing songs from her latest album- particularly the single “To Be Loved”, my favorite-I-can-never-listen-to-it-again track (we all have one per album). The soul-shredding final “let it be known” screams the cost of choosing yourself for a person who only knew love to mean constant self-sacrifice. As if she was screaming at the world that this was not a rash, self-absorbed decision.
Reader, she tried.
* * * *
It’s been years. I am not the same woman I was. And I had to stand in front of that man and tell him the woman I am now is not a woman he would fall in love with, no matter how much he thought we would work now that he was “ready”.
Because sometimes you just have to walk away. You are too far gone to ask someone used to you loving them a certain way to just be ok with an earth-moving shift. I’d argue it is kinder to walk away than to ask him to change everything about how he interacts, relies and enganges with you. Just because I have drastically changed does not mean you have to. It is far easier to find another me than to ask you to try.
And reader, I tried.
I tried. I tried pretending I was solely responsible for my personal happiness and for the happiness within the unit of our relationship. That I needed no affirmation. No tokens of thoughtfulness or consideration. That I did not need to know he saw me in the world at large, and in his world specifically.
But even succulents die, and I could no longer live hollowed out.
* * * *
The sole place setting at my table was not a matter of no longer wanting companionship. It was a realization that the woman I was becoming, and the parameters with which love would be possible for me, with the massive amount of space I need to remain intact and not fold into my partner- well no man I’ve ever met would tolerate those circumstances and I had no interest in looking till I found one. Similar to my fleeting desire for children, it simply was not enough of a want for me to attempt to overcome the obvious, glaring roadblocks in my path. It was a want, not a need; and I’d long had been accustomed to carving new paths when I could not get what I want.
The greatest trick I might have ever pulled was convincing anyone that My Table for One was a destination I planned and not a place I ended up. This was borne of me taking a frank look at my life and making the choice to build a solid life out of the cards I’d been dealt, rather than a sandcastle of an imagined life contingent on a person who would likely never arrive.
I asked, “If the life I have now was all I ever have, how can I make it work for me?” and turns out I liked the life I built more than the one I’d unsuccessfully tried to.
Oh, but reader, let it be known.
I tried.
My Table For One 