You Should Know

Chattering away

I curled myself up into a ball on the sofa. A lazy Friday night, visiting my aunt and my cousin. So much better than going out for drinks. One weekend night without a party is actually worth more than it sounds.

We talked about uncles and aunts. Long-dead great uncles. Favorite grandparents. We talked about the lovers in their street, how two families lived across from each other and rarely exchanged a world, how small the world was, how small it is becoming. We talked about people we knew, and some we didn't.

But my aunt is a gossip. She doesn't mean ill, she just has stories. That's part of the reason she's fun to talk to. That's part of the reason there's never a lack of conversation. But as you listen to her little scraps of stories, about how this one gained so much weight after marriage and how that one has such a talented and gifted child, about how X was supposed to marry Y, you get on your guard. Because slowly and naturally the subject turns.

So what happened with K? So mysterious some people are.

I shrug my shoulders. It doesn't matter whether I know what happened with K or not. That's his story, not mine to tell.
Yea, it's a complete mystery isn't it! Some people really know how to keep secrets, I smile. Who knows what his reasons were.
Maybe I do. Maybe I know one or two.
But I shrug.

And your dad, he's so!
Haha, yea totally.
I know a different father. Not the one she describes. She's got half of his personality from when they were all kids. I know him as the man he is now. And maybe not completely either.
But I shrug. I nod. Oh man, yea, haha.

Because it's not my story to tell.
Because words mean one thing to me and another to her. If I say X is super neat, the next telling of the story makes his kind of a neat freak. The next almost someone with an OCD.
There is so much more than the stories we tell.
And if it's not my story?
A shrug, I suppose. A smile and a nod. A well placed "hm" - that is all.

This is new.

He was on his way to meet our close mutual friend for dinner.

4:58 PM me: come kiss me and then gohaha

4:59 PM A: haha i would love to, just meet me at...
Friends to more. Maybe it's just this easy.

The Doldrums

I told him I was feeling “yellow light” about our relationship. I expressed openly that I felt he was running too far ahead in his mind, too fast. I feared he was picturing me with a ring on my finger in the first month! Now it has been three months and I feel as if our relationship has not progressed at all. He still barely touches me, and I too take his queue and barely feel comfortable touching him. We share about our lives and write lovely prose to one another daily.. but I don’t sense any emotional depth developing. He feels like a really good friend. We see each other just about once a week. Maybe two times in a weekend and we sit across tables at restaurants and talk. He tells me he misses me via text and sometimes I think.. I just don’t miss him.

A month ago I had sent him an early e-mail joking about showing up unannounced at his apartment and how I pictured him hunched over his computer fast at work, with his mother’s recipe for cinnamon rolls baking in the oven. As if he was waiting for me, hoping I’d show up. That night when we’d planned to hang out, I showed up at his apt. and there were cinnamon rolls baking in the oven.

On Valentines Day, I was in Scotland, Edinburgh, to be exact, visiting a friend. This would have been the very first Valentine’s Day that I would actually have a valentine and possibly a date. He made me the sweetest hand typed valentine encased in the envelope of a “Modern Love” by David Bowie 45 record. He gave it to me before I left on my trip. Once the 14^th of February arrived, so did a bouquet of deep red tulips.. IN SCOTLAND!

On my return from this trip across the sea, arriving at Newark airport, looking quite a fright after a very early, very long flight, I dizzily exited the terminal looking for the air Tran only to find him standing there with a sign, with my name on it, waiting to greet me and take me home.

It is now almost a month later and so far from his sweet attempts at showing his affection. I thought we were unmoored, in a good way, detached from the harbor prepared to let the current take us away. Maybe we hit stagnant waters; maybe we drifted into the unseen doldrums. I am seeing him tonight, after not seeing him for a week and next week he is away on business. I am curious to see if my affection is enflamed by his absence or if this slow stream screeches to a halt. Only God knows the path of the currents.

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?

When I was fifteen years old my dad lost his job. Tried as he could to find a job in Rochester, the only positions he could land were located in Kansas City, San Francisco, or New York City. He took the year long commitment in California, hoping that after that time something would open up closer to home.

But it never did. And for five years my parents endured their own long distance relationship. As far as I knew, there was no mention of divorce or separation. They simply made it work. I went through my formative dating years under the bizarre and misinformed assumption that a happily married couple could remain just that way, at first cross country and later cross state. “We’ve never really had to work at our marriage,” my dad once told me. He looked at my mother. “Right? Have we?”

“Well, it was really tough when you got cancer and you had to go through the radiation.”
“Were you going to divorce me when I got cancer?!”
“Well, no! I just mean that it strained our marriage.”
“But that’s not what I’m talking about. I mean we’ve never talked about getting divorced.”

But I knew that was a lie. After the fourth year of my father’s weekly six-hour commute from New York City to Rochester (every Friday there, every Sunday back), my mother sold the house in Rochester and moved to New York so they could finally live together. She was miserable away from her friends and family in Rochester and suddenly the word divorce hovered around that house like a ghost. But it came with melancholy, not malice. “Sometimes I think your father would be better off without me holding him back,” my mom would say. And my father would say quietly, just to me, “If it wasn’t for me, your mother could still be in Rochester. And happy.” But divorce was just a far away, simple solution that no one would ever capitalize on. They could never be without each other, for better or for worse.

I never realized how this affected me or my views on relationships until I started to examine what I have with the LDC. What’s so wrong with long distance? With the way I grew up, I may never know.

I'll Be Seeing You

There was something intoxicating about the moon last night. I laid in bed watching TV in the dark and noticed a spotlight transcending my curtains. I crept out of bed and pulled back the curtain. It wasn’t a spotlight. It was the moon. It was big enough that I could make out all of the craters on the face, and it was bright enough that rays pierced the blackness of the sky on all sides. I was transfixed. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

I got back under the warm blankets of my bed and watched that bold faced moon until it slid away from my view and into someone else’s. And once it was gone, all I could think was, “I’ll find you in the morning sun, and when the night is new, I’ll be looking at the moon but I’ll be seeing you…”

Spring

This morning, my Romanian colleague sent this martisor to the whole organization. A symbol of friendship and love, appreciation and respect, it's given out on the first of March to celebrate the beginning of spring.

Lovely, no?