December.

I’ve been lazy about posting lately. Part of it is that not much has changed, so it sort of feels like there is not much to write about. I am still living in the same apartment, working the same job, sleeping with the same man, and pursuing the same hobbies. I don’t go very far out of my routine or out of my comfort zone. I am currently perfectly fine with that, though. This is a period of rest, after much upheaval. I am breathing in again, taking ideas and beauty in where they will mature and unfold until they are ready for me to breathe out and birth them. I’ve been reading a lot of fiction, playing games that exist in fictional worlds designed by others, and sticking close to what I already know how to do in the kitchen. I did make a little sketch of my cat’s head the other day. But on the whole, I am on pause.

School will be starting back up again in three and a half weeks. It will continue for another six months, after which I will be done. Really and truly done. I’ll have my M.A. in hand, and it’ll be time to start looking for a real-life, grown-up, career-type job, so I can begin paying back my student loans. So it seems fair to me that I am on pause right now, doing nothing in my free time but cuddling up with a man and a blanket and a cat and a book, sleeping for too many hours a day.

I did get us a little rosemary holiday tree. Today I decided that, since some of its tiny leaves are beginning to turn brown, perhaps I should give it sunshine the next time the sun rises. Rosemary likes sunshine, and I want it to be happy. I wrapped it in a small string of white lights, and bedecked it with silver and lime-green and turquoise-blue balls, and put a sparkly glitter snowflake on top. Dave was all excited that it is “our” tree and no one else’s. His eyes lit up when he said how prettily I had decorated it. We leave it on every night as we sleep, and its soft glow does make it feel like a special day is approaching. I’m not much for religion, but I do like some of the trappings of the season.

Thanksgiving was fun, too. It was Thanksgiving for two, and I turned to him and said, “I’m thankful for you”, and then we dined on turkey (well, he did, not me), and mashed potatoes with vegetarian gravy, and green bean casserole, and stuffing, and asparagus, and spinach, and two types of pie. It was a lot of food for two people, even though I had tried to keep it small. We gave a heaping plate to our neighbor and feasted on the rest for days. I loved the cooking part. I always do.

Danielle will be coming down for Christmas weekend. Having her around will make the day seem a bit more special…out of the ordinary. Otherwise it would probably just be the two of us doing the same old stuff we always do. Pleasant and filled with contentment, but nothing departing from the norm.

Speaking of departing from the norm, we have some large and drastic ideas that are beginning to take shape out of the nebulous ether. Ghost forms of blueprints of plans that may or may not ever come to pass, but we speak them in midnight whispers. No one can truly know what the future will hold, but it’s beautiful and fantastic to splash around in the warm waters of possibility, looking out to the horizon and holding hands. It’s good to have a partner in plotting. This one is mine.

Year 2011 has been so much better than the last one was, and I have a feeling next year is going to be better yet.

Flipsides.

This is the story of a single stretch of sidewalk and two old men with New York accents who made their appearance about a year apart. They each decided, for whatever reason, that it would be appropriate for them to comment on my relationship, but their views couldn’t have been any more different.

In the summer of 2010 (I would say it was somewhere around mid-July), Dave and I were standing outside the coffee shop where he works. We were both smoking: he a cigarette, and I one of those clove cigars that Djarum offered clove-smokers as a consolation prize when flavored cigarettes were banned. Ambling up the street in a pack of sports-fan-looking tourists was a large, fat man, probably somewhere in his early sixties.

“Hey,” he shouted to us as he passed. Swaying a bit from drink, he broke off from his pack and headed toward us, glazed eyes fixed intently. As he got closer, he looked us up and down, finally pointedly addressing Dave.

“You let your girlfriend smoke cigars?!?” he spat in an incredulous, accusatory tone.

I immediately felt awkward. We were barely even dating at that point; I don’t remember if we’d even kissed yet, and if we had, it was super-recent. Still, I didn’t want to tell this vaguely threatening man that I wasn’t Dave’s girlfriend (yet).

I don’t remember exactly what Dave said to the man’s challenge; it was something perfectly smooth and reasonable…much better than I could have done.

“Ehhhh,” the man grumbled in response, clearly unimpressed. The wind of his discontented sighing brought the distinct odor of stale beer to my nose.

“Who’s the boss?” he said, his tone questioning Dave’s masculinity. When an answer didn’t come in a split-second, he repeated himself more forcefully. “Who’s the boss?!?”

“Tony Danza?” Dave quipped, and he and I both started giggling. The drunk man’s beery gaze, showing more open hostility now that we were obviously laughing at him, trained on Dave the best it could.

“Eh?” the man grunted, not getting the joke. “You are!” he roared, poking his finger in Dave’s face. “You’re the boss!”

We just kept laughing at him, and he grumbled again and turned to catch up with his friends. I was taken so far aback by the man’s anachronistic chauvinism that I hadn’t said a word the whole time, but Dave’s response was absolutely perfect. That snappy reply, coupled with the fat man’s lack of comprehension, has made “who’s the boss” an enduring inside joke in our household.

Today, we met the flipside of Mr. Boss Man.

Dave was crouched down, cramming his pre-shift cigarettes into his lungs, and I was sitting next to him. We were in the same spot we had been for that first encounter, which is the coffee-shop employees’ usual smoking area.

This man was older than the first one, maybe in his early seventies, with perfectly white hair and a heavy frame that he supported with a cane, tossing his weight from side to side as he made his way up the street. He wore dark sunglasses, and when he reached the spot where we where sitting, he paused and angled his face down to us. He gave us a sunny smile and commented on how frequently he’s seen us in that spot.

“You work in there,” he asked Dave, gesturing toward the entrance to the coffee shop.

“Yep,” said Dave, smiling politely.

“And you…you work in there, too?” he asked me.

“No, I just hang out here,” I replied, looking up to try to meet the man’s gaze through his sunglasses (to no avail).

“I see you out here all the time,” he said, and then to me, “you look more beautiful every time.”

“Aw, thanks,” I said, dropping my eyes shyly.

“You’re a lucky guy,” he said to Dave.

“Well, I’m lucky, too!” I volunteered with a grin.

“You are. You both are,” the man said, then paused, taking in a breath and looking thoughtful, with the smile that remained on his face going distracted-looking.

“My wife always used to tell me to tell women when I think they look beautiful,” he said. “She would tell me ‘Well, I know that you love me, but tell them anyway. It’ll make their day.’” He paused again.

“That’s sweet,” I said, not really knowing what else to say, having taken note of his use of the past tense in referring to his wife, and feeling kind of sorry for him.

“I met my wife when I was five years old,” he began. “Five years old, can you believe it? Living in New York City, and she moved from Ireland to right down the street from me. I rode my bike down the driveway and ran it straight into her. Twelve years later, I married her. Graduated high school on a Friday, and we were married Saturday morning. I was married to her for 47 years.”

“Wow,” I said, again at a loss for better words. If he had been speaking in the present, it would have been “congratulations”. His use of the past suggested that she’d probably died, yet he hadn’t said that she died, so I couldn’t offer condolences either. So, not at all awkwardly (haha), I said it again. “Wow.”

“I love this!” he brightened up, pointing back and forth to Dave and me, indicating our connection. “There are three rules. Let me tell you. One day when we were fifteen, my future wife and I went to Central Park with a bucket of chicken and two great, big Cokes, and she said ‘You’re gonna marry me’, and I said, ‘Oh? Isn’t the guy supposed to do the asking?’ and she said ‘Shush, listen. You’re gonna marry me, and there are three rules, OK?

“‘First, and this is the most important one, you never lie to me. And I’ll never lie to you. OK? Second, never go to bed mad at each other when we fight,’” he added an aside, “…because you will fight.

“‘Third, you never cheat on me, and I’ll never cheat on you’,” he quoted. Then he took a breath and said, “and I’ll add a fourth rule, something my father told me. He sat me down and said, ‘Look at your mother, with nine children, running the house. Remember that the woman is always right, because a happy wife makes a happy life.’”

I had been listening to his entire screed, mentally making notes of places where I agreed or objected, but pleasantly smiling and nodding the whole time.  Never lie? Sure, OK, that is something to strive for, if perhaps a bit unrealistic. I think that there are always going to be at least a few tiny, white lies between any two people. Never go to bed mad? Well, I haven’t yet been truly mad at Dave, so I don’t know where to stand on that, don’t know what it feels like. Never cheat? Of course not. Abso-fuckin’-lutely not. It would be the stupidest thing in the universe.

But wait a minute. The woman is always right? Nah. Not always. One of the things that I love about Dave is that he is my equal, and we can disagree and engage in respectful debate. How dreadfully boring it would be if he always deferred to my opinion. I shot him a sidelong glance, only to catch him checking his watch. I realized that he’d probably less been actually listening to the story and more wondering when it was going to end so he could scoot into work without being late.

He made his excuses and extracted us from the conversation, and as we walked into the coffee shop, he looked at me out of the corner of his eye, smiled and said,

“Who’s the boss?”

Nobody is. Or, we each are our own bosses. And that’s just how I like it.

Thunderstorms.

My dad, whenever I brought a guy around, or would talk about one on the phone all bubbly, always said, “Yeah, but is he smart enough for you? Does he really get you? I don’t think he does.”

And I said, “Well, I mean, I think he’s smart. Yeah.”

And he said, “No, you don’t understand. Is he on your level? On the level of the brilliant, weird, amazing person that you are? Does he get YOU?”

And I would shrug noncommittally, and say, “Sure, I think so.”

I never understood what he meant until now.

Yes, Daddy. He does.

Devices.

Writing a post on the intrauterine device (IUD) that I acquired about three years ago has been on my mind for some time, but I had been on the fence about it because I thought that some of the details necessary to properly describe my experience might be TMI or squicky to some people. After having been asked about it by more than a few women who found out that I had one, and after thinking a lot recently about birth control and hormones, I decided that I would go ahead with the post, reasoning that it might help some women to have the information, and anyone who does not want to read further about the most delicate inner workings of my most delicate inner parts can stop reading right about…here.

I got a copper IUD (the non-hormonal type) inserted in September or October of 2008, after having been on birth control pills for twelve years, and having recently married. I made the decision to switch to a non-hormonal method of birth control because I was curious about what my womanly body would feel like in its natural state (I had been experiencing some sex drive problems, and looking for something to blame), plus I was honestly tired of taking a little pill once a day for forever, and I had borderline high blood pressure (which can be caused by BCP). Before choosing the IUD, I considered getting fitted for a diaphragm, and also considered using a computerized fertility monitoring device and just avoiding having sex during fertile times. I decided against the diaphragm because it is supposed to be used with spermicide, and I don’t care for the stuff; I decided against the fertility-avoidance method because what I last remembered of my natural cycles was that they were horribly erratic, and there seemed to be too great a chance of messing it up. I hadn’t originally even considered an IUD at first, for two reasons:

1) I’d heard horror stories, both about failure (someone I knew said their mom got pregnant even with an IUD in place) and about damage to the organs causing infertility,

and

2) I was under the impression that they wouldn’t even “install” an IUD in women who had never been pregnant, and I never had.

Then I heard that someone I knew had (and liked) their copper IUD, so I did some internet research which quickly cleared up my misgivings on the first point: the older IUDs had some serious issues, but the newer ones were both safer and nearly as effective (99.4%) as perfectly-taken birth control pills (99.9%). And really, who has taken their birth control pills 100% perfectly, at the same time every day, without ever forgetting one?

The second point was a little hairier. After calling around, I reached a few doctors who were completely unwilling to insert an IUD for a woman who has never been pregnant, and went to a consultation with one doctor who would only prescribe the Mirena (hormonal) IUD in such cases. Finally, I found a woman doctor (not sure if this had anything to do with it, but all of the no-gos had been men) who was both on my insurance plan, and willing to do the insertion.

Luckily for me, my then-husband had really good insurance, so the whole thing cost me only a $15 co-pay. The husband part was actually kind of important, too, because even the willing doctor I found was explicit about the fact that my being married played a large part in her decision to insert for me, since IUDs are recommended for monogamous relationships where the risk of STDs is low. At the time, I was living in North Carolina…your experience, in more liberal or more conservative areas, might be different.

I don’t remember much about the individual steps of the procedure, only that it hurt like the dickens. But only for a brief moment; it was more intense, but much shorter in duration, than getting a small tattoo. Immediately after the procedure, I had some very serious cramping for a bit, bad enough that it made me run to the hallway bathroom to take an emergency shit on my way out of the building. The mega-bad cramps subsided within an hour, and I had some moderate cramping for the rest of the evening. The next day, I was fine.

A few weeks later, while doing the recommended string-check to make sure it hadn’t expelled, I felt the end of the device protruding from my cervix. That was not supposed to happen. I had to go back to the doctor’s office and get it adjusted. This is apparently rare. The doctor who fixed it was the resident expert on insertion, and explained to me that the first doctor was not very experienced in that procedure. I wish he would have been the one to do the original insertion, but hey, you take what you can get. The adjustment, once again, hurt like the dickens, but I have not had any problems since, and there was no additional cramping after the adjustment. I would recommend to anyone considering this route to make sure their doctor is very experienced.

For the first couple of months of having the IUD, I had some interesting side effects. One was copious amounts of cervical mucous that felt like gobs of snot falling out of my vagina from time to time. Another was an extraordinarily painful and heavy first period. Over time, the pain of my periods and the heaviness has decreased, to the point where I now have what I think is a pretty normal period, lasting from 5-7 days. Some months, I do still have intense cramping, but it only lasts for a day or so, and is killed with large doses of Aleve at regular intervals. But for the first year, the cramping was so bad for about 1-3 days, that no amount of NSAIDs could help me, and those days I was useless for anything other than lying in bed with a heating pad pressed to my abdomen. And the bleeding was so heavy that it made me anemic and I had to use an iron supplement that tortured my stomach.

I don’t want to scare you away from getting an IUD…now, I actually LOVE mine, and later on I’ll detail exactly why, but I want to honestly present the side effects that I experienced, and in that first year, not all of them were pretty.

A little tangent on my personal history, and the facts about birth control pills:

I first got on BCP when I was 14, about a year after becoming sexually active. I got them free from a clinic near where I lived in Baltimore, and I took them religiously. My mother had made it clear that I “was not aborting any grandchild” of hers, and pointed me in the direction of the same place she used to get hers back in the day. I started menstruating at 10, and my periods were never anything that approached “regular” until I got on the Pill; I’d go for three months without having one. My cramps were super intense and evil in those early years, to the point where sometimes I’d just lie on the bottom of the bathtub with the shower running and moan.

When I got on the Pill, not only did I get to have predictable periods, but they were lighter and shorter. AND of course, I didn’t have to worry about pregnancy. For a brief time while I was 19 and single, I went off the Pill. I didn’t get my period at all for three months, and went to the doctor and, for my irregular cycle they prescribed me…the Pill again. So that’s how I ended up having been on birth control pills for over 12 years by the time I turned 27.

So my really bad first year with the IUD may have been just a continuation of that rather than an effect of the device itself. Lighter, shorter periods are a known, common side effect of hormonal birth control, so part of my trouble was probably adjusting to my natural state.

Anyway, back to the original discussion…

After having been off the Pill and with the IUD now for three years, I can pinpoint a few other effects of being hormone-free:

1) My sex drive. It was definitely affected by going off the Pill. For the first almost-two years of being off of it, I was a ravenous, sexually-insatiable beast. I wanted sex ALL THE TIME. Even my desire for girl-loving skyrocketed. Sex became more than a nebulous idea floating around in the back of my mind that I could concentrate on and will myself into wanting, which is what it had been for years. It became a primal, visceral NEED. In the past year, it has mellowed a bit, but definitely spikes around ovulation, about which I will say more later.

2) Attraction. Speaking of sex, I believe that my relationship with my husband began to deteriorate for reasons other than only how he treated me (although that was the vast majority of it). According to fairly recent studies, birth control pills interfere with the natural mate-selection process. Women on the Pill choose, based on pheromones, different mates than they would choose in their natural states.

Once I reverted to my natural state, I found myself being nearly irresistibly attracted to all sorts of men…men who weren’t my husband. I would get weak-kneed over random dudes who sat next to me on the university shuttle bus. Develop crushes on classmates at school. Engage in risqué banter with coworkers I’d known for years but never found attractive before. The foundations of my marriage were already weak, and I believe that this new level of attraction that I had not ever experienced while artificially estrogenated (new word?) gave me a glimmer of hope that there was more out there for me. I think it pushed me a little further toward moving on.

3) Hair. When I hit puberty, I sprouted quite a bit of body hair for a teenage girl, including a rather pronounced “happy trail”. I believe that my arms were also hairier than normal. By the time I was 13, I inhabited more-or-less the same size and shape body that I have now, with slightly slimmer hips…and more body hair. My hair also had a bit (not much at all, but a bit) of a wave, especially in the coarser hair on the underneath toward the back of my head.

As I grew older, my body hair grew thinner and finer, and my head hair got finer and straighter, to the point where it was stick-straight. I had just attributed the body hair decrease to the effects of plucking and waxing…by the time I was 23 or 24, I never had to wax anymore. But then, after I went off of the BCP, slowly, very slowly, it started to grow back. Now, I am back to the same level of plucking and waxing that I needed at 18; I also am growing my hair long for the first time in a few years, and lo and behold, the itty-bitty amount of pre-Pill wave is back. To the wave, at least, I say, “HOORAY!”

4) Zits. I never was a pimply person, but now, I get a zit or two about once a month.

5) Natural cycles. For the first time in my life, I have a naturally regular menstrual cycle. It comes complete with the previously-mentioned libido spike around ovulation, cramps that start about a week before my period does, two or so days of wicked irritability, and a general predictability (though I don’t think I’ll ever be a to-the-hour kind of girl). If I woke up from a coma and had no idea how much time had elapsed, I could almost tell what part of “my” month it was just by my mood, libido, energy level, etc. I think that’s kinda neat.

…

So, I’ve discussed some of the drawbacks and the neutral side effects related to the IUD and going artificial-hormone-free. Now for the good parts:

1) The sucker is good for TEN. FRICKING. YEARS. While there is a good chance that I will want to have it out in order to breed at some point before its 2018 expiration date, even if that happens, I can get another one, and it’ll be good for ANOTHER TEN YEARS. Which basically means that, as opposed to having to take a pill every day, or apply a patch every week, or insert a ring every month, and all of the related doctor visits for prescriptions, I have to worry about getting new birth control only twice before I’ll be biologically incapable of conceiving and never have to worry about it again.

2) Spontaneity. I am not just talking about in-the-heat-of-the-moment here, like one must deal with for the barrier methods. (And of course, condoms are still advisable in situations that aren’t long-term monogamous or polyfidelitous). I’m also talking about being able to leave on vacation, or crash at someone’s house for a couple of days in a row, without worrying about whether you have your pills (or whatever) with you, or whether leaving them in a certain place will expose them to too much heat and make them ineffective, or if you need to stop at the pharmacy again. Truly, it is freeing.

3) Certainty. With a birth control method so foolproof, there is very, very little chance of unplanned pregnancy. And even if I ended up being one of the 6-in-1000 women who do manage to get knocked up even with the IUD, the IUD is so bad for pregnancy that I would be far less conflicted or guilty feeling if I decided to abort.

4) Reversibility. If I do decide I want to conceive a child at some point, I just get the thing yanked out, and there is no amount of time I need to wait for my body to adjust…I’ve already made the journey from hormonally-doctored to all-natural. It took about two years for my body to completely adjust and get regular, predictable cycles where I can actually feel the ovulation taking place. If I were on hormonal BC and decided I wanted a child, that means I probably would have to have waited around two years to be able to conceive…kind of a big deal seeing as how if I ever do have a kid, I plan to wait to near the last feasible minute.

5) Certainty (for him). My boyfriend never has to doubt my birth-control status, because he has access to my vagina and could just stick a finger in there and feel the damn string for himself, if he were doubtful or curious. I have not asked him if he has ever (purposely) done this, but I would not fault him for it of he did or had, since it is not unheard of for baby-crazy ladies to be less than honest and/or vigilant in their BC practices.

6) Health issues. I no longer have high blood pressure. If something goes wonky in my body, I know it’s not a side effect of my hormonal birth control. If I have a weird cycle after months and months of normal ones, I will go to get it checked out, because my cycle is my own natural cycle and not just withdrawal bleeding.

I guess that about exhausts all I have to say on the matter. I edit my posts a lot, so if I think of something important that I forgot, I will come back and add it in. Sorry if any of this was too graphic, but I did warn you.

Thirty.

In a few short hours, it will be my thirtieth birthday. I welcome this rolling over of the odometer of my chronology, welcome leaving my twenties behind. Never before have I felt so solid and certain of myself. Never before have I felt stronger, more aware, or even more beautiful.

I had a lot of crazy adventures in my twenties: cementing my connection to my bestie (we met when I had just turned 18, but really got close a few months before I turned 20), moving cross-country twice, starting and graduating from university, starting graduate school, getting married (& ending that relationship as well), lots of back and forth across the Mexican border engaging in shady business, a backpacking ramble through the towns and jungles of Costa Rica, lots of drinking and carousing through quaint Southern nights, lots of wide-eyed psychonautic voyaging in the bass-thumping back lots of L.A., lots of boys and sighs and arguments and heartbreaking…writing and editing and falling off of porches and out of trees and into laps and in and out of love.

I changed my mind back and forth about what I wanted to capital-D Do with my life, career-wise, about half a dozen times (and I’m still changing it). I had three long-term relationships ranging from 2-3 years, each dying from a lack of respect. In between, I had one 9-month-long romance which marked the only time I really got my heart broken (and looking back, I’m glad that I did, because it has to happen to everyone once, and I kind of deserved it). I learned how to interact with people more easily than I had been able to all through my childhood and teens, and how to overcome shyness, and fake my way through feeling awkward. I got into the service industry at 21, and learned how to tell what people want just by looking at them. I went through periods of bleak misanthropy and bright hope. I figured out that I shouldn’t drink as much as my peers, and certainly not as much as I had been drinking, because it tends to make me volatile and amplify my emotions. I went through a creative dry spell where I had little desire to write or draw or sing or paint, and could barely read fiction because my imagination was asleep.

I hit a transition point somewhere about halfway through 28. Things started to change rapidly, and about a year ago, right around the time I was turning 29, my imagination woke up again. The creative force within me grew insatiable, sprouting new ideas and demanding to be fed paint and paper and driving songs. And as the dust of my ending marriage cleared, I realized that going through the whole process had made me stronger and made me able to see more clearly. Standing up for myself made me see myself more clearly, made me see what I was fighting for and why I was leaving.

The end of my marriage taught me a big lesson. For most of my twenties, I had grown used to throwing my love, fistful after fistful, into an abyss. Many men are black holes of love…you toss it to them and they eat it greedily but reflect nothing back. I wanted so badly to give love and to be loved that I settled for a subpar situation: someone who didn’t respect me, who didn’t really see me. I believed in that whole fairytale lie and thought that if he loved me enough to marry me, then he must love me enough. But it wasn’t enough. In the process of my marriage ending, I decided that never again was I going to throw away love on someone who didn’t return it in kind to me. This Fiona Apple lyric, from “Oh Well” summed up my last relationship to a tee:

When I was looking with calm affection/you were searching out my imperfections

Actually, that whole song describes that whole relationship. Well, I finally learned my lesson about wasting my love. It was almost involuntary. I reached a breaking point, and my love flipped off, just like a switch. And I suddenly just didn’t care anymore. It was only a little sad, and the sadness was more borne of disappointment and knowing that I was going to have to deal with something difficult than sadness that things were ending. I didn’t hurt. I didn’t hope for things to change. I just took a cold, hard look at myself and my circumstances, picked up my things, and moved along.

I also learned something from grad school, but not what I was “supposed” to be learning there. I learned what my priorities are. I learned some more things about what I don’t want. I learned that I can do almost anything, but if I try to do too much, I lose a grip on all of it. I learned that I can get into a top-ten Ph.D. program, and do well, which I always would have wondered about if I hadn’t tried it. I learned where my strengths and weaknesses lie. I learned that there is an effective upper bound to my intelligence, but it can be stretched and extended with focus and determination. I learned that I don’t really want to be a professor. I learned that I want to be free of that place.

And lately, lately I have been learning about real love. When I was 28, and smack in the middle of hitting this strange transition stride, I met Dave. I wrote all about that first year in a post this past July, but the time since then has been incredible. One might think that sharing a tiny bedroom-sized apartment with (as Danielle puts it) an airplane bathroom and a ship-kitchen would be a recipe for killing the romance, but we’ve just gotten closer (figuratively) as we’ve gotten closer (literally).

We spend our post-work nights and days off playing video games together, watching movies on the computer together, or doing our own things individually mere feet apart, but there is always a small, spiderwebby connection between the two of us where one’s actions jangle the web and cause the other’s attention to shift focus. I laugh while reading a book he’s read, and he wants to know which funny part I just got to. He snickers at an online video, and starts it over for me to watch as I curl up to see. I bring a spoonful of gravy from the kitchen for him to try. He reaches out in sleep, smiling, and cups my calf while I clean a paintbrush. Our waking lives are an intertwined mesh of the same 8 or 9 activities, looped in a repeating pattern, crossing paths, weaving away. And then, of course, there is the luxurious, decadent shared sleep.

Giving love to him is not throwing it into an abyss. It is more like sprinkling water onto a lush garden, where what I put in returns to me with accelerated growth and burgeoning beauty. In this fertile, green environment, I’ve relearned how to trust, and how to be worthy of trust. I’ve stared down the inner beasts that letting someone get this close to me has occasionally awakened, and come out on the other side of it a saner, calmer, and more reasonable person. Knowing him has encouraged me to be a better person, not because he looks at my flaws and tells me what’s wrong with me (he is the least critical-of-me person I’ve ever dated), but because his lack of trying to change and control me leaves space for me to figure out what kinds of good I’d ideally want to be and strive toward those personal development goals of my own. It is good.

All of these things that I’ve learned in the winding-down years of my twenties, coupled with all the learning I did while adventuring and from making mistakes in my early- and mid-twenties has set me up for a fourth decade of my life that is looking like it is going to be pretty flippin’ sweet. A lot of people I know, my peers, are or have been sad about their twenties ending, like they think their best years are somehow behind them just because their age has a new number at the front of it. Not me. I am wishing my twenties less of a wistful farewell and more of a joyous good riddance. I am better than I have ever been, and things are constantly improving for me.

Barring some sort of freak disaster, I’m guessing that the next thirty years of my life are going to be markedly better than the first thirty were. I’m about done with my schooling, and ready to find a way to make some money. I’m hopefully done with disastrous dating, and ready to make some love. I’m forging a new relationship with my family, on my own terms. I’ve made friends with myself.  I’m on a constant upward spiral, revisiting concepts and ideas and reforming them to be stronger and more sound. I’m happy, and getting happier all the time.

Hello thirty, pleased to meet you!

Shortie.

I have only 20 minutes before I leave for work, so this is going to be a short one. We are all moved into the new place. There are only a handful of things left to do before the place is finished being set up, including: Dave is going to finish replacing the outlets, switches, and outlet covers, Danielle is going to help me hang my giant mirror when she comes on Sunday, and we were going to get a TV.

So far, I love the new neighborhood. We are so close to Little Italy that it is easy walking distance to there and the nearby Denny’s. There are two very well-stocked convenience stores within 3 blocks, and a 7-11 not far away either. The neighborhood feels alive, like there are things happening here. On our very first night, there was a really loud party happening on our block, with people singing along drunkenly to all sorts of old music, including Dave’s favorite, Air Supply.

I baked my first batch of cookies in the new kitchen a few nights ago, testing out my chosen placement of all the cookware and supplies. So far, so good, and the cookies came out delicious. I made them with white, milk, and 60% dark chocolate from Ghirardelli, and also some of their fancy unsweetened cocoa powder. Yum!

The only thing I really don’t like about the living situation so far is that sleeping with the futon down makes it about a full size bed. Too big! I have to keep waking up in the night and crawling back to my lover, as I have somehow dreamily thrashed my way to the center of the bed and we aren’t touching anymore. I liked it better when we were sleeping in my old twin bed, constantly touching. Maybe we can start sleeping with the futon up…he crushed me when I slept on the inside, but the night I slept on the outside wasn’t so bad (he said I didn’t crush him).

There’ll be much less excess space on Sunday night when Danielle comes. She and I are going to Rosarito on Monday, and staying through until Thursday morning. We’re going to stay at a hotel on the beach, and have all sorts of fun adventures yet to be decided upon. She had some vacation days off, and was clamoring for someone to go someplace with her, and neither of us had ever been to Rosarito (plus it is close, and cheap), so I suggested that as a plan. I am getting pretty excited about it.

OK, gotta go to work. I will write a more in-depth post sometime soon, with more specifics about the new place, and my plans for the next couple of months, and doubtless some lovestruck gushy musings (as tends to happen).

Cohabitat.

Wednesday last week, my boyfriend Dave packed up his small pile of belongings and transferred them to my place. Next week, we’re beginning the move into a new apartment, a small and adorable (and best of all, CHEAP!) studio about half an hour’s walk from downtown. I’ve still been looking for a new tenant to replace me so I can end my current lease a month early (and now have some promising leads), and I’m staying here in my “fishbowl” (as Danielle calls it, because of the multi-sided view) until near the end of the month when Matthew can take guardianship of my dog. Dave was able to get out of his last place early and save some money, so as of five days ago, we’re officially “shacking up”, as the elders put it.

So far, it has been amazing and wonderful: to come home from work and find him fast asleep in my twin bed (the bed I will be getting rid of to fit in the smaller place, where we will sleep on a futon) and to tiptoe around in the dark to find my non-work clothes; to go grocery shopping with him in mind, buying snacks that I know he will help himself to; to take him off guest-default-status so that he is expected to wash his own forks and knows he can shower/sleep/eat/game/whatever whenever he wants; to see his dirty laundry and mine commingling in the same basket, awaiting the same sudsy fate at the same time.

I will admit that there was a brief moment of trepidation on my part…the day before he was supposed to come to my house, I had a minuscule, hindsight-hilarious freakout where I suddenly became uncertain: Do I really know this person? How can I be sure that he’s one of the “good guys”? How do I know that I can trust him, that he’s not hiding something, that there won’t be some big reveal a couple of months down the road when our socks are sharing the same dresser and there is no room (except for the closet-sized one with the toilet in it) in which to hide? And I became overcritical, and in my mind I picked apart everything he’s ever told me and the existence of (even small, inconsequential) inconsistencies fractured my brain and made me quizzical.

But even as it happened, I was laughing about it, laughing at myself, laughing out loud as the words left my mouth. Because, of course, there is no way to really know someone but through exposure and time. And there is no way to know that you can trust someone, you just have to believe. And the only way to tell the good guys from the bad ones is to judge them by the actions you have seen them commit…what people tell you never matters anyway; after all, the bad ones lie when cornered. And so, now we shall have the exposure and time that will allow us to truly know one another. And it is time to believe and to trust and to know that everything will be all right because even if it doesn’t work out, we’re on a month-to-month lease and we’re smart enough to move along before hassle turns to hatred. And our actions-that-speak-for-themselves-so-we-don’t-need-words will be naked and plain in such a small space, and given the evidence thus far, I anticipate that they will reveal characters more deserving of love and respect rather than less.

The big thing that this move is facilitating for me is the elimination of so much (literal and figurative) baggage from the past. Those middle-school yearbooks that I’ve carted around to more than a dozen dwellings in the past 17 years? Recycled. Old notebooks and sketchbooks from my formative early adulthood? Trashed. I purged three-quarters of my wardrobe, cramming everything from lady-gloves to lacy bras to baggy hiking pants into two ginormous trash bags to be donated. I boxed for mailing some keepsakes from a dead friend (whose sister wants them) and some grade-school portraits (back to my mom they go) and some memorabilia from the first days of knowing my best friend Danielle (whose turn it is to guard them). And with the elimination of these things came a sense of intense freedom: if I died tomorrow, no one would be able to read the embarrassing ramblings and fledgling poetry of my batshit-crazy 19-year-old former self; if I had to take off suddenly for a foreign country with one bag in hand, I wouldn’t feel like I was leaving anything of substance behind…not a whisper, not a trace of who I really am, just some beat-up furniture, some linguistics textbooks, and still-too-many useful kitchen gadgets.

I started to look around at my things with a vicious, brutal eye, wanting to chuck even the things that I logically know that I should keep. If it couldn’t fit in one Ziploc sandwich baggie, and wasn’t serving some useful purpose, it was nixed: recycled, donated, trashed, sold. Because, honestly, the space we two are moving into is probably about the size of my current living room. Maybe smaller. The landlord said it was about 330 or 350 square feet (I can’t remember which), which is almost exactly the square footage of the bus-as-house I eventually wish to own. It’s not tough for me to live in a space that small (when I was 13-17, my room was literally a walk-in closet), but it requires some ruthless downsizing from what I’d recently become accustomed to, having been married not that long ago to someone who grew up in the country and requires vast amounts of space and storage.

There were more than just objects that I needed to discard; I also had to let go of the echoes of emotional distress that surrounded previous cohabitation experiences. There’s no point in going into the details, but the general overview is that I have had a long history of moving (in and otherwise) too quickly with people I hadn’t known for very long and who I never should have been in any type of relationship with in the first place. Hence my currently-standing policy that I am never getting involved in any commitment to anyone that is scheduled to last longer than I have known the person up until that point (the one exception to that rule would be if I eventually decide to have a child; it’s a biological near-impossibility at this point for me to wait until I’ve known someone for 18 years before breeding with them). When Dave and I started looking at apartments, we’d known each other for a year, which was the threshold of acceptability for me given the slim possibility that we might not be able to find a place with a lease shorter than a year. Six months was what we were trying for, and the month-to-month we ended up with is even better. But I digress…where was I heading…oh, yes…

So, to start this whole adventure off on the right foot, I needed to just completely rewrite the old files, papering over the dingy, fading surfaces of bad memories of long-ago disasters with a fresh coat of hope. I needed to find new eyes, in a way. It was actually something that Dave said to me when we were talking candidly the day before he came to my house that gave me the necessary tool to do the repapering, that shined my eyes and made them new again. He said that every time you think about something in the past, it refreshes the memory of it and helps to keep it in your mind. If you don’t think about things, eventually you will forget them, according to him. And by my reasoning, if you forget something, then you don’t know it anymore; and folk wisdom asserts that “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”…while I don’t always believe that to be true, I think it may be right in this case. Because after all, I have learned the lessons that I needed to learn from my past mistakes. I have already integrated the necessary components into my current worldview. What’s the point in keeping the picture fresh of how I achieved that perspective? There is none.

I have learned enough from all my past experiences combined that they have informed and bettered the present version of me. I’m like a new update of a familiar piece of software: I know it’s better than the last version, but over time it will become less and less memorable what exactly has changed, and only the present performance and efficiency will matter. This version of me can trust my instincts and can, for the most part, rely on my perceptions to adequately maneuver me away from danger and toward happiness. My instincts are telling me that this move will steer me far past happiness into a realm somewhere near bliss. Time to observe, time to trust, time to believe.

Time is wiggledy & love is complex: a year in 3500 words.

One year ago tomorrow, I had my first real-world encounter with the most amazing man I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, although I didn’t know at the time that this would end up being my opinion of him. It will be the anniversary of our first date-that-I-didn’t-realize-was-a-date, and the whole thing started off rather strange.

The first thought I had upon seeing Dave was “he looks skinnier in real life than in his pictures”, and apparently, he had a similar thought about me, since the second or third thing he ever said to me was “I thought you were going to be fat!” (which made me blush profusely and have NO IDEA how to respond, wondering if, because he was so skinny, he was the type of guy who judges every girl who is not model-stick-thin to be a fattie). This initial blatant lack of couth on his part, thankfully, did not characterize our further interaction, although I will admit it put me in a defensive place for the first little while. Perhaps this was his plan, seeing as how he had specifically arranged for us to meet on “his turf” (a Starbucks).

In a way, I was relieved at how put off and uncomfortable I felt in those first few moments; I was meeting with him intending to kindle a friendship and nothing more, and I had feared that an instant comfortable connection would spell trouble. I thought from the first time I saw his pictures online that he was cute, but I’d only been separated from my husband for two months, and I was not looking for anyone to connect with on a romantic or physical level. If he had been charming, agreeable and sweet, instead of brash, fiercely opinionated and mildly insulting, I might not have been OK with hanging out for as long as we ended up hanging out that day. I was perfectly fine with the idea of having a challenging, borderline-antagonistic friend, and was absolutely sure that such a personality would not find enough favor with me to end up being a lover. Whew!

Still, it took me a moment to recover from the deadly-feeling embarrassment of having been assumed to be fat. I ordered my iced mint-tea with vanilla soymilk, took a deep breath, and sat down at a table with him. And promptly spilled my drink. Goddammit. This really was not going well at all. I tried to play it off, answering his questions about school with a neutral face as I died inside while mopping up soymilk from the table with a too-flimsy paper napkin. I quickly realized that I was going to need more napkins, and got up to get them. As I arrived back at the table, sat down again, and finished cleaning up my disaster, I got a really funny sensation. I looked around and realized that everything was swaying.

I looked across at him and said in an almost-whisper, “Earthquake!”

He started looking around, too. We swiveled our heads in silence, taking it in, and when it stopped, we had a brief, excited exchange with the people at the next table. After that, the energy between us was different. I suddenly didn’t feel quite so awkward and inept, having been the first one to identify the earthquake. And a little spilled (soy)milk no longer seemed such a big deal, after the floor trembling under our feet. We looked at each other and smiled in a laughing release of tension. And that is the story of how the earth literally moved moments after I met my now-lover.

After the “restart” afforded me by the earthquake, I was back on my game the rest of the day, unfazed by the various challenges this difficult character threw my way. We ventured all over downtown: we took leftover pastries to some punk kids who fed the homeless (during which Dave insulted my shoes, and I just looked at him funny instead of taking offense); we shared a meal of taquitos (this was the point where I felt we truly began to bond, talking about Disney movies); he gave me a tour of the hostel he was living in; we saw Toy Story 3 (and I totally cried, but I had warned him that I was a movie-crier); we drank about a million coffees; we sat on a bench outside of the mall discussing what makes a good name or a bad name and a good ass vs. a not-so-good ass. Eventually I decided to check what time the last bus to my house in City Heights ran: about 1:40 a.m.; hooray, we had lots of time! We went on a trek to try to track down cheddar-cheese pretzel Combos (and failed, ending up with crackers instead), and we ate said crackers sitting on a sidewalk in front of a closed restaurant as it got later and later, and finally the only place to buy another coffee was 7-11.

The whole time, I was almost afraid to look at him dead-on. I realized the next day that I didn’t even know what color his eyes were, so avoidant had been my gaze. I did notice that, in addition to being skinnier in real life, he was less bearded than in his online pictures, and milder-looking. Most of his online pics had a drama or an intensity to them, and in real life he looked open and friendly (kind of ironic, given that his personality initially presented as kind of caustic and judgmental). I didn’t really want to observe him closely, so I mostly only looked at him peripherally, noticing that he had a tense energy about him, wriggling and shifting.

He kept challenging things I said. I was not used to this, but adapted quickly, and it became a game. He’d drop some subtle little challenge, calling me out in a way that, if I weren’t paying attention, would have been easily missed. This is how I decided he was really smart: the subtlety he was capable of in conversation. He also made me laugh a lot; every time it happened was a welcome break from the intensity of whatever we had been discussing. By the end of the night, we were sitting on a bench waiting for my bus to come, and I really didn’t want the night to be over. At the same time, I was obviously not going to spend the night with this strange (by which I mean both weird and unfamiliar) man; I had no desire to sleep with him, and no plans of catching dirty looks from my ex (with whom I was still living) for staying out all night. So the night had to end eventually. Around 1:35, nine hours after meeting, we said goodbye as my bus pulled up; he went in for a hug, which I allowed, not really sure what to make of the whole thing.

On the ride home, I couldn’t help but rehash the whole day in my mind. What a weird person I had just encountered! I’d never met anyone quite like him. The next day on the phone, I told my best friend all about it, telling her how brilliant and at the same time kind of antagonizing this man was, and how impossibly difficult to describe.

“Is he cute?” Danielle asked, with a suspicious edge in her voice.

“Um, yeah,” I replied. “But I’m NOT ATTRACTED TO HIM! I swear to fuck, I am NOT!”

“Uh-oh. I see where this is going,” she warily intoned.

“No! You are WRONG!” I insisted. “He may be cute, but his personality is too abrasive for me. I think we’ll be good friends, and have fun intellectual debates, but that’s where it ends. I swear!”

“Uh-huh, sure…” she clucked, obviously not convinced.

I had had a completely different idea of Dave after that first meeting than I would later develop. For some reason, he had me believing, upon meeting him, that he was kind of an asshole: constantly deriding or criticizing something, constantly moving, not content to just chill or just enjoy. I knew the personality type well; I had dated my share of over-critical assholes.  I think I even told him as much, when we were sitting on the sidewalk, shooting the shit about relationships and how things can go wrong. It turns out that he is not really an asshole after all. In fact, he is one of the sweetest and most appreciative people I’ve ever met…but I’ll get to that point later.

Time is funny. That whole event, a year ago, at once seems like it could be five years ago or four weeks ago. So many events have occurred in that year, so much has changed…and yet I can still call up the specifics of that first day like they happened last month. There are things that happened three weeks ago that I recall less clearly.

And our path through that year has been a meandering, circuitous path. How, for example, did I go from “uh-uh, no way, not a chance in hell am I dating this person (despite his being cute)” to “OMFG, best person ever, I can’t ever see myself getting enough of him”?

The short answer is that he’s sneaky. He let me know shortly after that first meeting that he was attracted to me, and despite my initially not feeling the same way, somehow this odd character wormed his way straight into my heart with disastrous cooking nights, midnight meetings, stolen kisses, and cheesy movies. Somehow, despite my beginning our second hangout irritated and cursing because he stood me up for a couple of hours (overslept, if you’ll believe it…), despite my resolve not to become romantically attached to this person, despite my life being terribly complicated and my having a month-long trip to Costa Rica planned for six weeks after meeting him…by the time I left for that trip, I had gotten into the habit of crossing town to meet him at 2 a.m., fallen into a dangerous pattern of exhilarating teasing, and realized one morning as I got out of my own lonely bed that I missed with a desperate pang his unique metallic scent, even though it had only been a few days since we’d seen one another.

He wooed me with sweetness and temptation, willing to go far out of his way for me and make time for me and say unbelievably tender things to me for how short a time we knew each other. I was half asleep the first time he told me that he loved me…mere weeks after meeting. I had hung out at his place late and crashed on his floor, and I briefly awoke to him looking me over, telling me that he loved me and that I was “so pretty”, quietly, like he almost didn’t want me to awaken and know. He lured me to want him, by getting close enough that I could catch an inkling of what it would be like to be with him, and then pulling away so quickly that I would wonder if it had all been a dream, another half-sleep revelation whispered and not declared. It was a delicate dance, a treacherous game, and I felt like Fiona Apple in Shadowboxer when she says “I was onto every play, I just wanted you.”

I saw very little of the blunt-and-mildly-insulting character that he played on that first meeting. I don’t know if that whole thing was a product of foot-in-the-mouth nervousness, or a planned strategic measure to see what and how much I would put up with or respond to, or simply a side of him that he has since realized doesn’t evoke positive response from me and so he saves it for the people who like that kind of thing. Every meeting since our first has been characterized by attempts to connect (both genuine and devious), more sweet than sour (and very often quite salty, too…). Dave was definitely an acquired taste, but the most delicious thing I’ve ever encountered, once I grew to appreciate the nuance. There was something heart-racingly dramatic about being pursued and captured so, taken halfway against my will into a fantasy world where late nights were our shared habitat and goodbyes, even for a single day apart, became a drawn-out, breathless affair with the intensity of a love scene in a romance novel, though our clothes remained on and we still called each other “friend”.

By the time my plane took off for my big adventure, I was madly in love with him (although still in a complicated situation, and so still not in a position to be his “real” girlfriend, not for a long while). I spent many long travel days and wakeful tropical nights staring off into space and missing him, much to the chagrin of my traveling companion, who tired of my pining. I obsessed over every tiny correspondence my spotty internet access allowed, with a sweet message making my day, and a sign that he might be forgetting about me breaking it. I hunted high and low for the perfect gift to bring him: a t-shirt, which I wore on a hike through the jungle to feel closer to him, like a pre-hug since he’d never worn it yet. I was terrified that he’d get so distracted with other girls while I was gone that we wouldn’t be able to pick up where we left off, killing a blossoming romantic friendship that, in my eyes, held a lot of promise.

When I got back from the trip in mid-September, and finally got to see him again, it was wonderful, tentative, weird. The intensity on his side seemed to have faded somewhat, but for me, it flared brighter than ever. My birthday was shortly after my return, and I ended up over at his house, spending the night after my other plans ended. I couldn’t stay away. The entire months of October and November were spent in this nebulous region where I wanted more of him than he was willing to give (without a higher level of commitment) and he wanted more of me than I was willing to give (because my situation still had me both walking a tightrope and internally confused). I was a ball of torment, chaos, and instability. It was basically all my own fault. He was ridiculously patient, waiting in that weird limbo until I finally felt resolved enough to give him what he (what we both) wanted. Finally, after a particularly revelatory Thanksgiving weekend, we became “official” at the beginning of December.

Love is hard. Even after becoming “official”, for a long time things were the oddest combination of excellent and apprehensive. There would be patches of total awesomeness and patches where I got the feeling that something was terribly wrong. For stretches of weeks, I would feel like we understood each other completely, like there was perfect synergy, like we were the luckiest creatures alive. But at other times I would feel certain that, even though I had committed to him totally, he was somehow still keeping one eye on the door, or fanning old flames for the sake of having options. (I’ve done that a lot in the past, myself, so maybe part of that was guilty paranoia).

It took quite a bit of convincing on his part for me to let go of my fear. I feel a little sheepish about it, but it’s true. I didn’t make it easy on him…I require lots of attention, affection, communication, honesty, openness and time spent in order to feel happy and secure in a relationship. I believe that I can neither be expected to bend myself out of shape to fit another person’s needs and desires, nor can I expect another person to bend to mine. It’s all about whether we can get along as whole individuals walking a parallel path by choice, and whether the way each of us wants to treat the other lines up with how we each want to be treated…so whenever I saw a sign that our wants and needs might not compatibly coincide, I would seriously consider jumping ship to spare us further trouble. In April, he had to put it to me bluntly: I was just going to have to believe. And it wasn’t easy for me, but somehow things kept working out:

While occasionally I had thorny little flare-ups of jealousy, envy, doubt, fear, and sadness (oddly, he has seemed immune to these…or just better at hiding it), they always ended up being hashed out reasonably, and balanced out by large doses of communication, comforting, affection and love. A small episode of my own jealousy, in particular, surprised me; in general, I’m not a jealous person, but then, in general I’ve never wanted something so completely as I’ve wanted this man. My desire would occasionally consume me, become greedy, with an intensity I am unaccustomed to. Yet after each blip of negativity, after each letter I would write pouring my heart out about my latest concern, we would talk, cuddle, hash it out…and there was never any backlash––no lingering grudges, no repercussions that made it seem like it was a bad idea to raise the concern. After each occasion of confusion, hurt, or frustration, the resulting effect of having had and discussed a problem was increased clarity, more love, better understanding and deeper satisfaction and peace.

The past month or so, especially, has been magical and amazing and beautiful. The end of the school year and the synching up of our schedules brought an increase in the amount of unstructured, casual time that we spend together. After our recent travels, conversations, comfortable silences, mellow days apart, long days spent in each other’s company, hanging with each other’s friends…after debates, agreements, giggles, sleeping, dreaming, kissing, sweating, freezing together…after sharing beds, clothing, meals, inside jokes, long car rides, frank opinions, grumbling gripes, gasping pleasure, sidelong smiles…after all that, I think we both feel so solid in our connection that it would take an awful lot to shake it. I laugh in the face of little things that once would have bothered me or made me unsure. I feel like we have reached a place where we are unquestionably, undisputedly together; where we can count on being able to weather things instead of worry about whether they will dissolve “us”; where when we wake each day and make a conscious decision to choose each other, the decision is not a difficult one, but more like the only one that makes sense. Love isn’t always hard. Sometimes it is easy.

I think he feels it, too. When he looks at me, I see calm acceptance, peace and happiness on his face. He looks like he knows that he is loved, and that he understands that I am in it for the long haul, whatever that may end up being. When we wake, entangled, it is the best feeling in the world; I feel happy and safe and home and thrilled, and when he opens his eyes a slit and smiles and curls one hand around me extra-tight, those small gestures telling me he feels the same way, I could about die of contentment. But I won’t die of it; I will live on it, use it as a base for all of the other wonderful things we will find and build and make together.

I was telling him the other day that I have, in my life, been used to moving from place to place, always dragging some boy with me, always my way or the highway, with my way usually BEING the highway…and how this time, I wouldn’t mind being the one to be a follower, just to see how it would work out if I let my path run parallel to his indefinitely. I want to paint murals on the side of the road of his life, to put the pies in the roadside diners, to be the warm bed he finds when a key turns in a door. I want to fill the world with beautiful things for him to enjoy, and put enough happiness in his life that it balances out every heartache he has ever endured.

Somehow, this one has captured me so entirely that a year into knowing him, he makes me feel glowier than I felt at four weeks, more elated than the first day we were “official”, more secure than I’ve ever felt in any relationship. I barely even notice other guys, and when I do, it’s with a dismissive “my boyfriend is more awesome than that!”

He told me not long ago that he is happier than he has ever been, and…so am I. I am so excited to see where else this can go and how much better it can get. So this is love. Real love, the kind that inspires more happiness than drama and heals more wounds than it inflicts, the kind that has been non-existent in my life up until meeting this amazing man. It’s wonderful, and let me tell you, people, it is about fucking time.

Counting my luckinesses.

Today in San Diego, the sun is shining. It is even almost warm outside (68°). I have the day off of work. The school year is over, and since I am taking Fall quarter off, for once I do not have anything in particular hanging over my head that I am supposed to be doing.

I finished my second year of grad school in good standing. I got a “pass” on my first comps paper (kind of like a Master’s thesis, it’s one of the requirements for an M.A.) and although I haven’t gotten my grades for the quarter back yet, I am not worried. I have a 3.76 so far. I have one more class to go until I have my M.A., and then another 3-5 years for the Ph.D., should I decide to finish it. Right now, I am leaning toward yes, but I do ride the fence on that one quite frequently.

I’ve gotten about 75% of my housework done, and will finish the rest when the new mini-vacuum I ordered arrives tomorrow. All of my laundry is clean except what I wore yesterday. My roommate is out of town for at least another five days, so the stove is going to actually stay clean for that long. Hooray!

I got a job tending bar at a fancy French restaurant; I genuinely like tending bar, and most of the people there seem pretty cool so far. I hear it is almost the busy season, so soon I should be making decent money.

I have a boyfriend who not only treats me well, but is damned smart and ferociously sexy. Now that school is out, I am already getting to see more of him. I love that we enjoy reading books together, and think the same kind of TV is funny. I love how much physical contact we have, almost always touching, even just a little bit. I am happier in my relationship with him than I have been in any other relationship. In three weeks it will be a year of having known each other and going out together (not being “official”, but seeing each other) and things are better than they’ve even been. He is an amazing person and my life is greatly improved for knowing him.

I have a best friend who is always there (albeit at a distance) when I need her, and even when we have nothing in particular to discuss, we still have to tear ourselves off the phone at the 3.5-hour mark because it’s getting late. Over 12 years of friendship, we’ve only had two fights. She is my ever-constant, and I literally do not know what I would do if I didn’t have her in my life. She’s my life partner, and one day we’re going to be cackling, tea-drinking, white-haired old biddies together, kicking it in the sunshine on a porch somewhere warm.

I am by no means rich, or even solidly middle-class, but I have enough money to buy a cheap parking space downtown, own the limited number of gadgets I prefer to own (a nice phone, laptop computer, iPod), and feed my pets high-quality food so that they stay healthy and happy. I don’t have to check my bank balance obsessively to see if I have enough cash to eat out somewhere nice if I feel like it. I have high-speed internet and good water pressure.

A few months ago, my car’s front end got redone and painted, because someone dented it up in a minor accident. The repair fixed dents and paint damage that had been there for years, so now, at 12 years old, my car looks better than it has since 2002. That magic workhorse Honda still runs like a dream, and other than a cracked exhaust manifold, I’ve never had a single mechanical problem with it.

I am fortunate to possess a creative drive. I am compiling components of the present I am making my boyfriend for the anniversary of our acquaintance, and getting really excited about it. I want to make chocolates and jewelry and paintings and songs and drawings and bloggings and SO MANY THINGS!

I lucked out pretty hard in the genetics department. Somehow I managed to be born intelligent and decent-looking and can eat 3 pints of ice cream in a week without needing to hit the gym. I regularly get mistaken for 17-22, despite the fact that I am turning 30 this year. I am by no means perfect, and of course there are things I would change if I had the money (hello, braces and Lasik!) but I am happy with myself. I love being me, and I can’t imagine wanting to be anyone else.

My pets are adorable and they love me. As I was typing this, my cat came up behind me and curled up right there, so she could be close to me. My 12-pound cat and 50-pound dog wrestling together is one of the cutest things in the world. They love each other and have licking-bathtime together.

My family loves me. Despite having had my differences with them over the years, things are feeling a bit better right now. I had a good phone conversation with my mom where she *finally* seemed to accept me as I am, and accept that my path in life is my own. I was flabbergasted, in a pleasant-surprise kind of way.

I mean, damn, I have a lot of good stuff going on. How did I get so lucky? I try never to take this stuff for granted, and to be appreciative every single day. And even during the hard days, there is usually at least one thing (usually Dave) that makes me smile. Life is good. So very good.

Desire.

The word “desire”
acquires new depths of meaning
as his wide mouth touches mine
and opens.
My passion grows paws and
a swishing tail and
jungle-cat mass; it
knocks me flat on my back and
I am left dizzied, gasping, arching,
flooded with chemicals telling me
not “fight” or “flight” but
right-right-right
here.
And time loses meaning;
a single instant becomes my entire life,
one point of light expanding
to swallow the sun.
My thoughts cease to be sentences,
forming single singing words:
Beauty.
Love.
Mine.
Dave.
Love.
Desire.