"You belong among the wildflowers..." Tom Petty sings over the cafe speakers, bringing me back to as close to a time of sweet naivety as I can claim to have. I wrote a love letter then that it didn't matter where we were as long as he was "somewhere close to me". His love was sweeter than chocolate, Sarah McLachlan style, and one of my favorite memories of all time is driving together in a truck with classic rock on the radio and as AC/DC was playing I said, "What are American thighs, anyway?" He paused for a moment and turned to me with a mischievous smile that he couldn't hide if he tried, patted my upper leg, and said, "These are, honey." Although he really hated where he lived, It's a Great Day to Be Alive was one of his favorite songs and the only country song he liked, and he turned up that Travis Tritt tune for me driving around that North Carolina town. I learned more about sex that first summer in that apartment than I had all my years leading up to it, in the two twin beds pushed together to make a nest, surrounded by strings of lights and candles with roommates outside who just giggled and understood, as we listened to John Hiatt and William Topley and John Mayer, who by the way wrote Your Body is a Wonderland just for us. When he started looking at me like I was choosing Spain over him I held up the phone to his voice mail as "Have a Little Faith in Me" played in concert at the Barrymore. It's only recently that I can hear Staind play It's Been Awhile and not get choked up when I hear "It's been awhile since I've seen the way the candles light your face... It's been awhile... But I can still remember just the way you taste..."
I sat down with the intention of shutting everything down and hopping into bed to be really warm for the first time all day.
Instead I started sorting out emails (deleting, archiving; something that is a little of a time waster but actually is soothing to me in an OCD sort of way). Inevitably I see ones about my brother that make me cry a little, but tonight was not the night I stopped on those. The ones I kept coming across in a random-seeming manner were ones from him, from this man I have this dance with.
I haven't ever gotten too far away from thinking about him since we met, some years ago now, but in the last couple weeks he's been especially present in my thoughts. Maybe it's my maternal clock, or my gray hairs, or my count-down to 30, but anyway the thought that has been re-appearing in my head is that maybe we should give it a shot, like a real shot, like we never really have before.
I read these emails from every few months over the last couple years and I felt foolish tonight. They aren't notes, I realized, they are love letters. Spread out it's harder to see, but then I think of him and how little he gives up, how as little as he's let me in is many times more than he's let almost anybody else in, and I think of the things I've written about him, and how he's seen me in many a situation (with family, at a party, by myself, healthy, sick, sad, happy, on vacation, at work, in a relationship, in a break up, single, single and hunting, hot, cold, naked, clothed...) and I have clarity. Not direction or purpose, maybe, but clarity.
I don't know if we'll ever really make that leap. Sadly, but sweetly too, I write that knowing how much I'll miss him one day if we don't.
It snowed again. I have lost count of how many times it has snowed since the first snow, back in November, the one that kept me in the suburbs for an extra night and made me realize I needed new tires before I did anything else.
It's really pretty again, as the new snow has covered up the dark gray mucky slush stuff that everything was transformed into. I put on my galoshes to run the trash out today and didn't lose feeling in my fingers during the 30 seconds it took to complete the task, so that means it's not quite as cold as it was two weeks ago.
Last week was the first time I woke up and thought, "Ok, this is getting a little wearisome." It's still ok, I'm still fine, I'm just more excited to see colors again in a few months than I am for the snow. And they'll come; tomorrow is February, a short month, then in March we get the official start of spring. The colors and warmth will inevitable come, the blooms, the late light, the heat, then in 7 months I'll be writing about how the humidity is getting wearisome and that I'm getting excited to be bundled up and trudging through white stuff.
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