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By k3davis Date: 2004 Jul 06 Comment on this Work [[2004.07.06.17.33.27429]] |
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This is not your typical love story. I'm a twenty-nine year old man. I've never been married, and have only once had a girlfriend - a relationship that lasted six months and literally ended with her leaving the country. :) I know I'm a funny kind of person both in humor and the weird way my life and heart have been laid out from the start. But through everything that has happened, God has made me a good person. There is no good in me that was born there or that I myself made. But everything good in me comes from God's hand. I painfully realized but accepted a long time ago that I would never find anybody that could be for me, after plenty of years of wanting and not finding. I'm not entirely old, but my age does begin to count against me along with everything else. I know nobody deserves to inherit me. I'm an orphan and was grossly abused in my youngest years. Those years don't haunt me like they once did because they are long gone and I've healed in many places. I am my own person now, not a product of my childhood, and I (mostly) like who I am. But I still feel damaged. From those years which I remember next to nothing of I know what happened to make my mind associate physical closeness with pain, anger, and shame. I am a pretty easy person to get to know and I don't have many secrets, but I get turned off by any hint of sexuality. It can actually make me ill. I'm a very relationship-oriented person. I want to know people closely and be part of their lives. But in the case of romance, I don't know how I would ever let that get beyond the heart and into the body. There is a wall there, but I met somebody who finally makes me want to break it. I met her in February 2004. I'd seen her around a long time before that and never gave her much of a thought. I was working at her school, and she wasn't in any of my classes. I may not have even been able to tell you her name. We shared a project though that month and immediately enjoyed each other. We talked a little more here and there after that. We would talk about the mundane. We would share a joke. We'd vent a shared frustration. We would laugh some more. Then we would talk a lot. I laughed like I don't remember I ever have. And we shared a few things that were deeply personal and serious. I have had a lot of wonderful friends come and go in my life, and have only most rarely gone without, but I don't remember ever meeting a person that I could just *click* with quite so smoothly and quickly and completely. Someone I could nearly just fold into. And she's really amazingly short, which is great for a man of 5-foot-3. ;) It seems it can't be helped that the girl is beautiful inside and out. We are both musical. We both love to write. We share a lot of passions. Although she has a wonderful family (something orphans notice) she was abandoned and adopted into it herself. She's quite a bit more sporty and coordinated and generally organized. I'm generally a more emotional type and she has a bit more of a pragmatic side. She has a softie side too, but she protects it much more than I do. When something difficult needs to be done those roles sometimes reverse. Part of that is just gender probably. I'm all for equal rights and so on but I'm so glad that God made man and woman different. It would be no fun if we were all wired the same. The timing of course could not be worse. She has more years of school ahead 3 states away. Employment will probably force me to relocate myself in a few months, and with both of us knowing there are a couple years anyway before either of us are in a place to pursue a relationship like this, it would be cruelty to both of us if I sought to follow her. We both know it is impossible. We have from the beginning. I'm afraid we didn't even worry about it until just slightly too late. We've only very briefly discussed our feelings directly because of that cruelness of time. Neither of us want to escalate into something that can't be right now. And yet, both of us do. The impossible is almost the most desired thing. We write back and forth while she's away. Our notes hold too many inside jokes to count, a lot of memories of good times, a year for every week. There's a veil of distancing in them too, but a thin one. We never say what we mean, and I suppose we agreed not to knowing that would only make things worse. Yet I can't believe it as I read and write them. The words might not be used, but they are love letters. If something is said that might seem a little too close to home, we'll even use the third person as though it was some sort of believable diversion. We exchange often silly or cheap but deeply sentimental gifts. We agreed not to say or do things to kindle something that can't be right now. But we often find ways to cheat. It has all the trimmings of an early romantic love even without those three little often abused words. At the end of the phone or online conversation or email, though, is always that quiet deep ache. I didn't know what the feeling was at first, even though it seemed familiar. I got a chance to see her this week and we spent some extra time, maybe even our last chance, for a long time or forever, I don't know. Maybe we didn't realize how much we missed each other until we saw each other again. But the goodbyes, as practiced as they get to be, are constantly harder to bear. And afterward is that feeling - a feeling I have suddenly realized is grief. I've lost countless people in my life. I've even buried a good number of them. I know what grief is and what it feels like. No other emotion breaks the heart and steals your ability to breathe for months on end like grief. But I've never felt it before for a person who is still living. It may not be worse but it certainly has a different terrible feeling to it that words don't allow this poor writer to describe. So I realize that in spite of our most valiant efforts and knowledge of its necessary outcome, that I am in love with this girl. I've felt pieces of that feeling for other (years later, seemingly random) people in my short adult years, but those feelings have never been returned before. As much as some forms of love are meant to be selfless and to be given without condition, there is a depth of adoring a person that can only be achieved if that person adores you back. I don't literally know if she adores me back, but there is certainly a tenderness there that shocks me every time I see it, or hear it, or read it. A tenderness that brings me a deep feeling of full satisfaction and relief from weary longing in its moment but that also frightens me supremely. It knocks on the door of some very, very old ghosts. She makes me laugh and think at the same time. She makes me feel appreciated and even lovable. She accepts my blunders and shortcomings while encouraging me to be better. She brings out the very best in me. Nobody has ever done all of those things for me before. Some of them have never been done before at all. The world might say that for a love like that, nothing else should matter. Or the world might say, forget the girl if she doesn't fit into the big picture of your moment and get yourself a high paying job and grab some success for yourself. I haven't polled the world lately and asked for their opinion, but I suspect I would get a little of both of those. The truth is slightly more harsh there in the middle. For the best of reasons, nothing can happen now. If we allowed it to anyway and plans to be cancelled, even in the name of "love," we would each be cheating the other. That's not what love does. So like many other times in my life I need to keep an open hand. As much of her that can stay is welcome to stay. As much of her that needs to go must be free to go. My selfishness wants to cling tightly to her, but my love is fully aware of the hurt that would cause both of us. And so she goes. Who knows what will happen. I will certainly be the one as always to keep in touch, even past the point where many would tend to give up because they don't get enough back. She will want to keep in touch too, but her life is about to totally change. I know she will have to be focused on it and I don't know who else may be brought into it in those years. I want to hope that enough can be maintained that when a time comes when our seasons of life aren't both changing away, she might still be there. It is a strange feeling to be hopeful about love, and one I was pretty used to living without before I met her. At the same time I feel it doesn't pay to hope. I know that is a trained response. I also know she's too wonderful not to get found by somebody out there while she's away, somebody probably in the same season and more possible. It may be helpful for me that most guys are jerks or utterly clueless at best ;) but some great person is bound to take notice. Even the hope seems rather hopeless, but I can't trust or hope for anything other than that what is divinely purposed to happen, will happen, whatever that is. I can't know it and I can't control it. But I don't have to wait. She has already changed me enough to know that even if I don't get to keep her and there is nobody else out there who could love me like that, there is a part of me that needs to be brought out of the long dark and put away for good. I find it most unlikely that something like this will happen again, and right now it is a lot of hurting, yet she has indirectly warned me to be ready for whatever may come one day. Just in case. |