Lonely Hearts Club

For starters let it be known that I am not a Beatles fan, but they and their music are ubiquitous. Pictured to the left are the really lovely flowers that were waiting for me on my front porch when I arrived home from work today, after what was a surprisingly painless faculty meeting, comparatively speaking. I don't know too many people who'd object to flowers and I am no exception, but receiving them did engender some mixed feeling in me.

You see, last night we were up into the wee hours of the morning having a fight. One of those where you rehash things you've said before, and nothing really concrete comes out of it as a plan of action for improvement, and the only thing you're certain of by the time you say good-bye is that the love is real and that there's goodwill on both sides. I think those are far from insignificant things, btw. The fight happened slowly over the course of hours over text, and then continued for a while as a phone call after he was done with the show for the night. So getting flowers from him today made me feel really guilty for accosting him about things that were bothering me, and for starting a fight, and for keeping him up when he was really tired, and and and...Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the flowers and certainly not about his kind intentions, just saying that the context was poignant. He'd said when I asked him about if we were celebrating V-day this year that he wasn't planning to, so I don't know if that changed or if he just wanted to keep it a surprise. I opted not to do a card this year, he didn't seem to warm to my past ones much so I thought I'd find other ways to give him love.

(When your Love Language is "Time spent")

The flowers are not at all out of character for him, he's given them frequently both for events and holidays like birthdays and anniversaries, and also as something to cheer me up when I've had a rough week, or simply out of the blue. He once had a terrible day with a rough load out followed by bus breakdown issues and sent me flowers because imagining making me happy made him feel better. I wasn't sure if my parents would be able to budget the money to go to London with me this year, and he made a sizable cheque my birthday present to ensure that they could. Mom says she hopes he can come with us, but his job makes scheduling really hard because we don't know what contract he'll be on at that point. I hope he can too, mainly because the reason I complain and fret and bash my wings against the glass of our limitations is that I do really love him. And I like simply being with him more than I like even flowers. I don't want or really need largesse, I'm pretty self-sufficient after all, but I want him to talk to me and to hear me and for us to quite simply be. Together.

To be, and to be together. That's it, that the key. I suspect that this is where I've been failing him; not in the together part, but in the letting him just be part. At heart he's a pretty astonishing person. I call him "My darkness between stars" because everyone always speaks about light, of suns and stars, but the darkness is more full and fills all the spaces in between. We need the darkness to see the light. So, early in our relationship I told him:-

"I love you because you are like the space between words, like the darkness between stars; the essential substance that gives meaning to that which is more easily understood...I love how you have changed, are changing. I love that I don't know what you will be. Most of all, I love that in all of time, in all of life, I should have found someone who echoes back my own hearts' words. Who is kinder than he admits, more hopeful than he feels, braver than he is comfortable, and the source of more good than he will ever know."

(Accurate AF)

It's a pretty good description of a man who I have watched grow and develop as person over the course of almost a decade now, and who has met considerable trauma and personal challenges with energy and purpose. Who has taken the time, in the  midst of his own troubles, to see other people as real including me. He is generous to a fault, not only with his money but also with his time and attention if someone seems to need it; to the extent that sometimes I grow jealous of how easily he shares with others things which I consider to have meaning to us. I forget that he isn't mine, and those places and things aren't either. The thing I think I love the most about him though is something undefinable. The way he thinks, the way he moves through the universe, the way he can seem like the only real thing in an insubstantial and superficial world. He has stories in his head as deep as any myth, fidelity and loyalty to others, and a heart that is too soft to exist without walls. Once upon a time I wrote for him when I thought we were parting forever:-

"I love you like water; like rainstorms, like something precious which slips through my fingers and which I do not seek to hold because it should never belong to anyone. Like something life-giving, essential, elemental. To tell you that a thousand years would not be long enough, so how could a few months ever be?  There is a kind of void that looms before me, and ignore it though I do I know the shape well. It is tall and dark, green-eyed and deep, capable and careful. Nothing else will ever fill that space, and that makes me sad and afraid, and more than a little bit grateful."

So this is why I miss him. Why two days every two and a half months is so incredibly hard to be content with. Why I'm scared that he's becoming someone I don't know and won't recognize when he returns. Scared that there is never going to be an end to the waiting for him to come home. He asked me last night if we had anything in common anymore, and it was like an arrow in the heart, and for a breath-catch of a moment I was winded enough to wonder if there wasn't. Then I remembered all of the other things; the conversations until 4am, how in December we once again lay talking until daylight began to arrive about the ways we frighten ourselves and about the silly weird things we've seen. I remembered that we don't need to listen to the same podcasts and play the same board games to connect with the things that matter. 

As I sit here, that reminds me of something else too; that I used to dream, as people do, about what I would say to him should I have the occasion to speak vows to him. "I can't promise that you'll always be my everything; but you'll always be a part of my everything that matters." Last night, after the fight, after we went around and around about things with no solution, after we wondered about the future of our relationship itself, and after we tried hard not to go to bed mad, as we were hanging up he said simply "I'll always love you. I hope you know I only want the best for you." 

Same here, my love, same here. And thanks for all the flowers.