European longing?

How can it be that today hurts even more than yesterday? 

Maybe it’s the physical exhaustion, all the running around and wearing myself out, which has thankfully allowed me to sleep at night, now catching up with me and making me feel even more sad and anxious from loneliness. 

Or maybe it’s the dream I had last night, another one of those vivid dreams I have been having so often recently. I dreamt about my genderqueer European sweetheart and their wife. I know their wife, she’s a lovely person, we spent most of the time all three of us together last year and I saw her twice this year when she was visiting for a couple weeks in April: we get along wonderfully and there’s even some mutual liking between me & her. It was mainly me & her in my dream, and there was tenderness between us —  my genderqueer European sweetheart (her spouse) was more on the side. I cannot remember details except for a sense of delicate tenderness and strong connection, closeness among all three of us but especially between me & her. I woke up feeling as if they had both really been there by my side… so vivid… and so much more heartbreaking this morning. 

Maybe I should tell them, tell them both, about this dream at some point? 

I’ve asked my genderqueer European ex-partner for some “radio silence” to hopefully make the separation, or at least the regaining of my balance alone here in Colorado, easier for me. But maybe there’s value in sharing the sadness, sharing the pain…? 

For now, I feel the need to try and regain my footing here in Colorado, in this place that I have chosen as home, with my friends here, my job here, my life here. Because this love story with my genderqueer European friend has also rattled some of my certainty with respect to my choice of staying in the U.S. and staying away from Europe. 

For the first three decades of my life all I wanted was to move from Europe, where I grew up, to the U.S., where part of my maternal family resides. When I finally moved to California in 2016 it felt like — and actually was — a great liberation for me and I have never wanted to go back to Europe even for a short visit since then. But in all these years living in the U.S., and especially since moving to Colorado, I keep making strong connections with people who are either fully European or partly European or, at least, who’ve lived in Europe for a significant amount of time and have a clear idea of places, languages, customs there. It feels like Europe keeps calling to me through these connections I keep making as well as through the deep friendships I still have with many people overseas. 

I don’t think I want to move back to Europe to live, I cannot imagine myself living & working there anymore (I never really did) but there are lots of things that I miss of/from Europe. I still feel an extremely strong connection to Europe, especially certain areas or countries or cities there — there’s still so much I miss from there. Most of the time I forget about those things, forget how much I miss them; but then I meet someone who is (also) European and still lives there or someone who knows those things because they’ve been there, and the connection feels revived and the longing comes back. And this happened extremely intensely with my genderqueer European sweetheart: so many of the things we did together felt so “European” — speaking German together; talking about cities in European that we both know; walking (instead of driving) everywhere regardless of the road; spending hours at a cafe or restaurant even after the check had been brought to us; sitting around the kitchen table with their other European housemate sharing meals and chatting for hours… I loved doing all those things. 

Maybe — probably, certainly — I can continue doing them anyway even with my (local and/or American) friends here — for sure I could! But somehow the relationship with my genderqueer European sweetheart switched on that longing and now it hurts… Being with them felt like a “coming home”… 

Was that feeling of “coming home” my genderqueer sweetheart due to their being European or was it simply the persons that they & I are, our connection as people, our soul connection? 

That’s what I need to understand now — one of the things I need to understand — and one of my reasons for needing “radio silence” from them for a while now: I need to understand my deeper feelings and needs not only with respect to them and our relationship but also regarding my own connection and/or relationship with Europe and my different (geographical & cultural) identities.