FunkyPlaid (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} funkyplaid) wrote,@ 2007-08-03 16:40:00 |
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| Current mood: |  loved |
| Current music: | Gorecki - Lamb |
Twenty-four Hours.
It's been perhaps many years since I've spoken of my heart. Not just in here, but in general. I'd lost that interest, in outwardly vocalizing things that have come and gone, and especially about things that may one day come, or come again. It's not that I'm a terribly private person, but for some years I've felt it would just do more good to get stuck in important tasks, lists of projects, and ways to make myself better than to ruminate on loneliness or isolation from romantic ventures. For years, then, I've turned inward and not bothered to write a word on this, and likewise, I've built some impressive bulwarks that are ready to be breached. I hope you'll forgive me for this queer and long-overdue fit of cardio-approbation.
This is a story that shouldn't exist. It's a tale of love lost and then found, once flowing with the strength of ocean waves and then crashing on the rocks of impossibility, only to wear down those jagged obstacles in order to continue its inexorable ebb and flow. It's a storybook love, one in which cruel fate tries to interfere only to be staved off by all that is good and right and true. It's a saga and a sonnet, a reconnecting through the years and fears to come out the other side more whole than any part could manage alone. This is a story about making fate our bitch.
I first met Halsted by chance, when we briefly lived in the same town, just after both of us dusted ourselves off after massively long, brutal relationships. She'd wisped by me at the game store on more than one occasion in previous years, but I'd always made it a strict policy not to pick up on nor fawn over my customers – especially the married ones. To hear from her years down the road, and to have an opportunity to find out what she was really about, was an enticing and wonderful opportunity that I was happy to jump into.
And of course we got on like a house on fire. As the rooms burned, one by one, I realized that as busy as my life was at the time, I simply had to make the space to include her in my everyday. She had all the makings of an incredible ally – incontrovertible brightness, fathomless depths of knowledge and compassion, and unwavering loyalty. We started out as friends for many weeks before any romance had outwardly blossomed, but perhaps this was our staunch and well-crafted safety mechanisms ensuring that any latent foolishness was meted with near-plodding deliberation.
The romance did come, in the purest of ways, slowly and carefully, until it was blatantly obvious that we were making the right decision. And yet as soon as it gained momentum, I found myself packing up my entire life to move to Edinburgh for my graduate studies. While delightfully small and lithe, she simply couldn't fit in my suitcase, nor would I have asked her to drop her life and join me so soon into our relationship. So instead, she helped me with every little aspect of my transfer – and more – all with unflinching sobriety, strength beyond strength, and not a few twenty-hour days of painstaking preparation. And with not one complaint, not a single resentment nor repudiation. I had never felt so in someone's debt, and establishing a new life on the other side of the world without her was perhaps the most difficult task of my life up until that point. And then, four years apart. A more difficult task, yet.
Halsted is the one person whom I always figured I would marry; the one person who gave me a good, honest, devoted friendship and romance, concurrently and naturally. The one person whom I felt was helping me to heal, and and who most certainly dearly helped me strive to become a better person. We had all the makings, all the chemistry – no, the physics – and all the compatibilities. But we were too late, or perhaps too early, and my move to Scotland killed us painfully. It had nothing to do with us, only the distance between us. We let it go not because we wanted to, but because it was too painful to go on together, apart. We tried to maintain the friendship at all costs, but at times, the cost seemed too high, and we drifted farther apart than that proximity would describe. And when people know what they want but feel that it is not workable, sometimes marking things with a broad, black pen is the only way to survive. The ink seemed indelible, and our lives went on.
Not a single day went by when I didn't think about her, wonder if she was happy, silently wish for her success and delight, wonder how we would have ended up had I stayed. She was universally loved by all my friends and family, and I received constant reminders over the past four years from them all that she was most definitely the one for me. But I was too scared to act and far too respectful to interfere in her then-current relationship, even though I had moved back home and we resided in the same city. We never found ourselves in the same places, though we had many friends in overlapping circles. We tried communicating on more than one occasion, but it was clear that there were forces outside of ourselves that contributed to making a steady rapport rather impossible. Yet neither of us knew precisely why.
The best I could do to keep her near was virtual: the beginnings of a letter that I had always wanted to send but never did, one that described her effect on my life and her reverence in my heart – unconditionally, without need for reciprocity. While changing in syntax and form, I wrote that letter every day in my mind, in case I ever found myself with the gumption to actually create it. I didn't even know to what end it would gesture, but I knew I had to tell her these things. But that was always One Day. It never happened, and instead I spoke wistfully to my friends and family of how I almost had the perfect woman and the perfect relationship.
It was her strength, bravery, and utter genuineness – the same qualities that drew me close in the beginning and which I uphold with the absolute center of my being now – that changed everything. One day during work, not too long ago, I received a one-line letter, suggesting a brief meeting in the coming days. An audience to talk and reconnect, to catch-up and to confess, and I remember my eyes going all big and having to rest my head on my workmate's shoulder for a moment as I considered the implications of this meeting. I responded in minutes, and we made plans to see each other at a friend's wedding party the very next day. Fitting, in a way.
It took us not thirty seconds from the time we embraced again to stretch the span of eight-thousand miles and four years and bring it all crashing together. But we played it cool for at least the rest of the day, which in retrospect is absolutely hilarious. I walked into things as we talked, ignored the hyper-detail that I normally notice in my standard goings-on. There was only us, and when our old friends came by to find her there in the house, it was like not a single day had passed. The basis had already been there, the acceptance, and the inclusion, and now it felt that we got to finally reap the rewards of it, something to which we once had to give a pass due to abysmally poor timing.
Irony of ironies, we started to see each other just over a week before I had another trip to Scotland planned, this time only for a month, but nonetheless a familiar specter with the frightening propensity to bring out so many of the same feelings as when I first had left. We've been in contact every day while I've been gone, conquering these ghosts, and concentrating on what beauty awaits us just ahead. In a way, this is the last day of my first move to Edinburgh, a prolonged stay that lasted many years more than the actual transposition, except that now my destination is clear: back to the arms of the woman I'll never leave. That's twenty-four hours from this very minute.
So now we're headed toward bliss – everything we've always hoped for and complete conviction and assuredness that we have the right person in front of us, for the long haul. I've never felt this before in my life, and I thought I'd felt everything. But Halsted helps me with this. Not just her presence and her devotion, but her total dedication to expression and communication, the bettering of both of our lives, together and individually, and the effortless way in which she loves. Her smile frightens bad dreams away and fills the world with the joy of just existing. I think everyone falls in love with her at some point, but this time she's mine. And I finally understand that I deserve it.
This is not. The greatest post in the world.
This is just a tribute. Rawk!
