For years I’ve had a recurring dream of being lost. Sometimes I get fired from my job and kicked out of my apartment. Other times, an old boyfriend breaks up with me, and I don’t know where I’m going to live anymore. I wander through labyrinthine hallways of memories, through seaside apartments and nighttime suburbs, searching for a place to go.

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Then I remember that I’m married. I actually do have a home. At any time, I can choose to leave my confusion and go home. I’m flooded with relief, like I’ve burst through a bubble of warped delusion. I run out the closest door in the direction of him. The sun rockets back into existence. I wake up.

I am not afraid of losing my love. I am afraid of forgetting that it exists entirely. I am afraid that it will become something I’ve buried in my heart, in the substrate of me, like a little treasure without a map to guide me back to its location. I am afraid that I will wander the earth searching for a thing I already possess.

Before I met Robert I didn’t know that love was supposed to feel like home. I thought that home was a thing I was destined to lose. In the early years of us dating I’d travel to writing conventions and have complete bawling meltdowns in airports and hotels. I’d sob myself to sleep because I became convinced that he’d be gone by the time I came back.

But he was always there when I returned.

He pulled the bedsheets over my exhausted body and for the first time in days I’d be able to sleep without nightmares. My nervous system relaxed in his familiar presence. I was home.

I was home.

Someone asked me to write a piece about soulmates a few weeks ago. Even if you don’t believe in the concept of soulmates, you still probably want one. Even if you don’t believe in things like souls, or fate, or eternity, you want someone who can touch the deepest parts of you and make you better than what you are. You want a love that is so all-encompassing and compelling that it holds you in its thrall and transforms you for its purpose.

I wish that I could give advice on how to find the love of your life. I wish that I could explain how to become the kind of person who is worthy of such a great love. But I can’t. When I met Robert I was a walking wreck, and in many ways so was he. (I told him once that he reminded me of a great horseshoe crab who’d been stepped on, and through its cracks the secrets of the universe were oozing out.) I was enamored with the idea of my life being a tragedy. I was going to live in such an epically bad way that people would be left gasping after my inevitable suicide. My oeuvre was going to be a violent blow to existence itself. I’d be such a beautiful victim of God.

I can’t give advice, but I can say that when I was with him, it felt like for the first time in my life there was a different way to write my story.

When I was 20 years old I moved to Austin with pretensions of being a starving artist. I’d dropped out of college and started writing $15 articles for eHow about taxes and gardening. (Things I knew nothing about.) Several months later, I ended up at a place called ‘The Dead End’, with about ten other people, including heroin addicts, burners, rage addicts, and an alcoholic bipolar artist that I was dating. (Sort of, but not really.) After a few months of drinking whiskey on the balcony and tripping on shrooms near the backyard fire pit, I wasn’t getting much writing done and I needed money. So my Dad told me to apply for a video game testing job at a nearby company called Edge of Reality.

I got called in for an interview. I got lost on the way there and barely made it in time. I walked into the huge building feeling disoriented and out of place. The receptionist escorted me to a glass interview room. There were three people on the other side of the table, including Robert. I shrugged out of my huge coat and sank into the seat in my ill fitting black dress and worn out boots.

I thought I bombed the interview but later that day I got an email with a job offer. I tried to quit my first day when I read the Dev notes in my email and panicked because I couldn’t understand any of it. Robert talked me out of it and insisted I needed time to learn the job. So I stayed.

Several of the employees called me retarded behind my back because I was so quiet and unassuming. I didn’t have a good sense of my worth, but Robert did. He told me I was intelligent before I understood or believed it myself. He stood up for me behind the scenes when other employees expressed their doubt about my abilities. He gave me tasks that I myself didn’t believe I could complete. But I did, and my self-confidence grew. Robert placed me on load testing and certs, which was one of the more complicated divisions of testing. Once a dev came to me and said he couldn’t replicate a complicated crash bug that I’d written a report for. I went over to his desk and picked up the controller and reproduced it within a few seconds. His jaw dropped. I heard him bragging about me to Robert and the producer, Jim, from across the cubicle divide. “Autumn is amazing!” He said. I’d never thought I was amazing before. Robert was the first person I’d known who’d really committed to bringing it out of me.

A few months into my job, my “boyfriend” broke up with me and I had a complete meltdown. I was kicked out of the Dead End. Robert found me in tears at work the next day and took me to talk in the parking lot. I felt like I couldn’t function. I didn’t know where I was going to live. But Robert had just moved out of his apartment and still had a month left on his lease. He offered to let me live there until I figured something out. I agreed.

He came and picked me up from the dead end after I packed my meager belongings - a couple clothes and some Philip K. Dick books, and took me to the apartment. I helped him clean up all the discarded cigarette packs and Coke cans. I made a joke about how he shouldn’t leave me alone with his sword and bottle of whiskey.

I said it laughingly, but he just stared at me and said, “Autumn, if you want to kill yourself, I can’t stop you.”

I’d expected him to be another person to rail against. I was used to people trying to curb my bad behaviors, treating me like a child, trying to “help me.” I wanted him to be horrified at my joke so that I’d have an excuse to rage, to feel like a trapped victim yet again.

He did none of those things. Instead, he stepped aside and told me that I was the one in control of myself. Nobody else I knew had ever tried to make me understand that I had agency over my own decisions.

That moment changed the entire trajectory of my life. It was like a florid bullet that pierced through the shell of my misconception of self and pushed its way toward my heart.

Robert ended up taking a job at BioWare in Canada. I cried when I heard the news. I’d never cried for anyone like that, and it seemed inappropriate to cry about your boss. I even heard a song he’d recommended while driving home, and that made me cry again. I didn’t know I was already in love with him.

I ended up taking a job as a designer in Seattle. I didn’t see him for several years after that, not until I came back to visit Austin and he had moved back as well. I threw a little party and invited him. I didn’t actually expect him to come, but he was the first one to arrive.

He said, “People are usually too intimidated to invite me to things. But you did. So I figured I’d show up.” We ended up going on a date the next night, before I had to leave to go back home.

I’d never remembered being so nervous before. I couldn’t believe someone like him was giving me attention. I felt unworthy, unfamiliar with myself. I’d gotten used to acting coy and silly, creating a kind of charming little shroud around myself. But every time I started to tell a glib half-truth, he’d look at me in a way that I could tell he saw right through it. It thrust me out of my own body so I could actually observe myself, and I saw how delusional I’d become. I knew that with him only the truth would be acceptable, but I’d been so twisted up over the years I didn’t even know what the truth might be.

Yet even through all that, he smiled at me with such naked affection. He listened intently to all my silly little half-truths, and responded to them seriously. He was not afraid of his own earnestness.

Later at the airport I texted him, “I’m glad that I know you.” He told me afterwards that because of that text he made it his mission to have me. He said the text was so pointed, so thoughtful, that he realized I actually loved him.

Back in Seattle I texted him, crouched in a bathroom that was decorated like the Red Room in Twin Peaks, while my friends drank in the next room. I told him I was at a “liminal point” in my life because I didn’t want to admit to myself yet that I wanted to throw away everything to be with him.

I’d call him after work as I sat on the rooftop of my building and made stupid jokes about how I wanted to throw myself off of it. That was my way of flirting. I clung to his voice across the line. Then we’d stay up late, talking until 4 or 5 in the morning. It felt like I didn’t need sleep anymore. I’d bounce into work on one hour of sleep, smiling, blood made of fire. I barely ate, either. Sometimes I’d bop over to the corner store grocery and buy a bottle of wine, but I didn’t feel like I needed food anymore.

I sent him pictures of myself drinking coffee or Redbull, or looking out a window with a half smile. He was 2000 miles away, and yet I felt his presence bathing my perception in a new light. Every mundane moment took on special significance. Everything became better, more joyful and more exquisite, when I was being perceived by him. He made me beautiful.

At some point I decided I was going to move back to Texas. I wanted to take things slow. I was hesitant. I thought I’d move to Denton and work with my dad, and then meet up with Robert in Austin on the weekends.

But it didn’t matter how quickly, or slowly, I tried to take things with him. I was not in control like that. I could not put a leash on my affection. I was in love. I’d bitten down on a star and it’d exploded in my mouth.

Besides, that, he saw right through my attempts at safeguarding my feelings from him. He was kind about it, but he made it clear that keeping him at a distance would not improve our chances of success. We both had to be all the way in.

And I wanted him.

I wanted him so badly that I knew if I didn’t pursue him with all the power that I possessed, that I’d regret it for the rest of my life.

So one night I held my breath in, felt the tight nervousness in my body, and exhaled. I told him I wanted to move in with him. In the next few days he sent me a video of the new apartment he’d leased for us.

I quit my job and bought a one-way plane ticket to Austin. My flight was at 4 A.M., and I didn’t sleep all night. All of my friends and I went out to a bar last night and I kissed my ex goodbye through a mesh window. I arrived that morning in Austin wearing thigh-high socks and a little miniskirt. He waited for me at the bottom of the escalator, leaning against a pillar. We embraced. I was still so nervous I couldn’t look him in the eyes.

In the car he put his hand on my leg and smiled at me and said, “I’m so glad you’re finally here.”

He drove us to our new apartment. We crossed the threshold and for the first time, I came home.

I wish I could say that this was the end of our storybook romance. That I could close the book here because everything that came after was just awash in a glow that was so brilliant and so boring it didn’t even warrant an epilogue.

Of course, it didn’t happen like that. I was only twenty-four years old and running on familiar destructive patterns. And when I think back to those first years together, a lot of them are fragmented. My memory turns on itself, smashes itself apart, eats itself. Little moments bob in and out of my awareness, buoyed out of the dark. I barely understood who I was. I was hopeless when it came to understanding the world around me. My perception came to me fractured. I didn’t know at the time I had borderline personality disorder, or PTSD, or had been running on a script of self-destruction. I just felt lost.

I remember one evening after Robert got home from work he ordered us some Chinese food. I was so exhausted that I couldn’t even get up from bed to eat it. He came to the bed and kissed me and said, “That’s alright, baby. It’s in the fridge when you want it.” It was such a simple gesture, but I’d never felt such overwhelming love before. I could tell in that moment that he wanted nothing for me except my happiness.

And I also remember sobbing alone in a theater while watching a Nick Cave documentary, assaulted by an alienating loneliness because I was convinced that he no longer loved me, and I would be consigned to being alone. Even his love for me couldn’t stop me from trying to run familiar scripts of pain.

Home is not a thing that waits for you. It’s a thing you have to build. All those years ago Robert drove to pick me up from the Dead End, and found me living in a house where the lawn met the door through a river of gleaming trash. Women’s underwear was stapled to one wall, and fragments of broken mirror spackled in blood had been glued to the other. I was often woken up by the screaming of my cokehead and addict roommates. One night one of them even shot a gun at the other’s feet during an argument. The sound was so loud and bright, it took me several seconds to even understand what I was hearing. Everyone there seemed to be running down the tunnels of a shared suicide wish.

I’d found my way to the Dead End because I liked the idea of no return. I found exhilarating freedom in the idea that nobody expected anything of me. I could sleep on a dog bed on the floor while a heroin addict fondled his pistol, suicide frantic in the next room. After I left, Robert seduced me by offering me a quiet room in a quiet apartment where I could think and breathe and give myself some space to figure out my life. I quickly found that a part of me didn’t want peace. I wanted to roil in the chaos of my own supposed badness. I wanted to stand in the shadow of a streetlight at 2 A.M., swaying while I smoked a cigarette, a strange boy clinging to my elbow. I wanted to press my evil grin into the side of a leather jacket that smelled like Axe and vomit.

I loved Robert. I also wanted to hurt Robert so that I could punish God. If I could sacrifice the love of my life on the altar of my pain, then I could finally sacrifice hope itself. I could look up into the heavens and say, “Look! I tried! Didn’t I try? You take everything good away from me to remind me that life is just a fucking cosmic joke.”

To get rid of Robert would be the ultimate freedom. I could finally crawl back into my last dead end, and die.

Yet there was another impulse in me. Its insistent voice told me that I needed to hold onto Robert. It told me I needed to do everything in my power to make things work between us. I’d been given the love of my life. Such a precious gift could not be discarded without losing yourself as well.

Once I burst into tears, in total anguish, because I didn’t know what to get Robert for his birthday. He took me outside in the courtyard behind our house so we could sit on a bench and he told me, “The only thing I want from you is your happiness.”

Don’t be fooled. This was not just a sweet, sentimental phrase. This was a request for a very expensive gift. When people say they want you to be happy, they mean they want your entire soul. Someone who wants your happiness will not be appeased with sex, or flirty banter, or money, or dinner and floors swept. They want the naked truth to shine right through the center of you and completely transform you.

If I wanted our relationship to work then nothing less would be acceptable.

I was split between the desire for love and misery. I grabbed my own hand so that my fingers would not come loose. I stepped on my own foot. I wrapped myself up like a snake with a broken spine. I’d start fights with Robert and then just as quickly, apologize, shaking, with tears in my eyes. At times, I was sweet and loving and playful. I’d make him dinner and bring it to him while he was working. I’d hug and kiss him. Then within the same day I’d become irascible, irritated. I’d perceive a minor slight as proof that he no longer loved me. Then the cycle would repeat itself.

I was sickened and exhausted by my interior civil war. I often wanted to give up. I doubted my ability to become someone who could love and be loved. It’d be easier to just fall apart and consign myself to hell.

Yet that insistent voice told me, You think you know hell? You idiot child. Keep going. I’ll show you what hell really is.

Hell would be to realize that you architected your own destruction and would do anything to take it back, but can’t. To realize that you were so close to heaven and you spit in the faces of the smiling angels who wanted to open the gate for you.

So I kept trying.

One day I sat down with Robert’s whiteboard and drew a vision of the life I wanted for us. I saw us in a home in the country with our three dogs, near the water next to a cobblestone path, and stars so bright that you could scoop them up from the reflection. It was a crude drawing, like a child’s dream, but it was the first time I’d really tried to articulate any dream at all.

I was nervous to share it with him. I didn’t even tell him what it was. He just looked at the whiteboard and said, “I get it. It’s heaven.”

Only when I started looking toward that house by the waters did my life really start to transform for the better. I could no longer hold my feet to the fire and compel myself by terror. It took me as far as it could, until I was ready to avert my eyes and look toward what I actually wanted. I needed to look at heaven. For myself. For the both of us. For our as yet unborn daughter.

It’s been years since I drew that vision of heaven and in that time since I’ve known happiness that I never thought possible. Even still, I know that happiness is a crude approximation of what could actually be. It’s a weak specter of all the vistas that would be open to me if I could truly let go and allow myself to crystallize joy as something real.

My dreams tell me the truth of my mental state. I keep forgetting that I’m home. It’s something I return to, over and over, a thing that I continuously hide and reveal. Part of writing this essay is the hope that I can construct a pattern to remember. I can stop searching for the thing that I already have. I can choose to be at home.

Finding the person you love is only the beginning. You have to become the kind of person who can learn to love, who can affix a positive vision of the future, who can build a refuge and a sanctuary to thrive. You have to look into their eyes and remind yourself at every moment that you are home. You are home. No matter how many times you forget, you have to keep remembering. You are home.

So go home.

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