ER
B-Movie Kraken
Karma: 1761
Posts: 13484
The sleep of reasoner breeds monsters. (sic)
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« Reply #18295 on: September 02, 2018, 09:33:34 AM » |
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Seventeen years ago this weekend at a party during a festival downtown, in a loft that had a good view of the fireworks that marked the festival’s conclusion, I met the man I married.
I came alone, that sin against the accepted rules, and he was with an attractive woman who threw the darkest shade my way when he spent most of the night talking to me, almost ignoring her, which made me feel awkward because I wasn’t there looking to hook up with anybody, and I didn’t, he still left with the woman he came with, but next time we talked, which was the day after, he told me he really didn’t like her and used to go out with two of her friends (oh, two, you say, hmm, red flag, thought I) and had only been out with her a couple times and was looking for a way to back off with the least trouble. Somehow him saying that struck me as amusing and I thought there I was talking to a man who had gotten serially involved with three friends. This one was funny.
He asked me what I was doing those days and I said playing tennis almost daily as a kind of therapy to fight off drear. He asked no, really, what else, and I thought, well, actually that was true, that was the story of my life in 2000-2001, but I said I was babysitting for my cousin and enjoying the days I spent with her two year old boy, who was fast becoming my best friend. Then I said I was deciding if I was going to graduate school and feeling like that was one of the last things I wanted, and I was coming off a leave of absence for a job I’d done since I was a teenager. He asked what job that was and for some reason I said consulting, and he said someone wanted to consult with a teenager, and I said, uh, yes, and he laughed, so I laughed too.
Those things sounded better, I thought, than other descriptions I could have used, like saying I’d spent over a year pulling out of deep sadness. I figured if I told someone that truth I’d either get targeted as an easy mark or he’d remember some videos he had to return and I’d never hear from him again, which at that point I wouldn’t have minded all that much since I didn’t know a lot about him beyond the fact I felt pulled to him in a way I hadn’t in a while. See, when you’re in a dark place like the sadness of mourning, it gets seductively easy to stay there.
Not long after that night he talked me into going out with him and we ended up walking up atop this overlook east of the city that had a famously magnificent view of two states, one of the highest points in the Midwest, and it was night so the lights were beautiful, their reflections on the river looked like Christmas on Main Street, twinkling rainbows, and standing in that place where I’d gone before with someone else, startled to find myself there and not sure it was right to be there with another person for that reason, he kissed me and I kissed him back, my mind blanked and I melded into the moment in that higher plane way where you stop thinking and time floats until you come back down, then because of where we were standing, its history in my life, I felt guilty about what I’d just done, and maybe for that reason but mostly for some others, it was the only time I’d kiss him in the rest of that year.
Truth is strange.
But he kept calling me, kept being around, nothing I did or didn’t do seemed to drive him away, it was oddly like he didn’t want to give up, and so I’d go places with him, not….going out, more like hanging out. I asked if he was into challenges and he said (I swear) no, but I’m into you. Who says something like that? So that was flattering and I said yeah, well, whatever, keep this up if you feel like it but the only thing you can know for sure about me these days is you don’t know how I am going to feel from one day to the next, and eventually I did mostly quit being sad and started going out with him for real about a year later, right about the time my job recalled me and I had to be gone A LOT.
Born under lucky stars, us, huh?
But skipping past many soap operatic episodes, a mere eight and a half years and one child after we met at the same festival happening tonight, we got married and we’re still together and I couldn’t love him more, he is so supportively understanding of me and my interests, my moods, my peculiarities, the oddities that frame my life, he is so good with our children and so sweet to us all that I find myself awe-struck at how lucky I was that night to be where I was to meet him (I nearly didn’t go) and how lucky I was he endured waiting on me as long as he did, and that even later during the storms and fogs and personal pilgrimages of our relationship he never went away, no matter what, so that three children and many years later we’re together and we remain in love.
It seems like lately life has been directing me to understand how much he means to me and how special a person he is, and on the seventeenth anniversary of our first encountering one another, it feels like a good time to say all this to whoever feels like reading it.
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