all the pretty pizzas
Today is a glorious morning! This morning my beloved wrapped his arms around me and wished me ‘happy anniversary’ with a big kiss. Today we have known each other twelve years. Roughly one-third of my life has been spent in the company of this man and he has nurtured, encouraged, supported, and loved me through thick and thin and today we are here and it feels like the blink of an eye. I still feel like that almost twenty-four year-old who looked into his eyes and saw something lovely and something familiar, something that tugged at my heart and intrigued me to the depths of my soul and yet I also feel like myself of today more happy, more responsible, more stable who still sees that beauty and feels that tug. I am very fortunate.
In the Spring of ‘96 I was freshly out of long term relationship that had been dying a slow long death, but had been over in reality for many years. In that relationship I had altered myself to make someone else ‘happy’, slowly coming to the realization that you cannot make anyone else happy for we are each responsible for our own happiness. It is not something you can give to someone else. In the aftermath of that I decided that I would never change myself for someone else. I would be myself and love myself and say my peace and if I ended up alone, so what? I’d rather love myself than have someone ‘love’ me under false pretenses. So began a new manifestation of myself and I decided to grasp life and live on my terms.
I dated a few guys who bored me almost immediately in their shallow pursuit of pleasure. I met a few guys who piqued my interest, but nothing that made me feel like ‘dang, I wanna read the paper every morning with this one!’. I met one fellow who I thought was very good-looking and to whom I could talk about everything, but he moved to LA. The Sun God festival was coming up and I invited him down to join me. The morning of Sun God he called to tell me he’d been in a car accident and wouldn’t be coming down. Something rang false and I immediately knew he ‘wasn’t that into me’ to borrow a phrase, but in my new found journey from caterpillar to butterfly I decided to not stay in and mourn my lost plans. Instead I grabbed a girl from work who I knew casually and said ‘let’s go to Sun God’ and we went.
We got to the pub and ordered some beer and slices of pizza and headed out to the patio only to discover there was no open seating at all. There was nothing worse than being banished to the inside of the pub, so we stood there for a moment to see if someone might magically vacate a seat for us. Yeah, right, on the afternoon of the festival everyone was there to stay. Off in the corner I noticed a table where everyone was standing and so I asked my friend, ‘Should we ask them if we can borrow their chairs for a minute?’ and she said, ‘I’ll follow you.’ So I walzted up and said, ‘hey do you mind if we sit in your chairs til you need ‘em?’ They quickly acquiesced. Now I was not hitting on them as I never even really looked at them. It just seemed convenient.
My acquaintance and I had never really hung out one on one, so we started talking and eating, talking and drinking, immersed in our own little social sphere. Meanwhile, the sun started setting and the guys whose table we had borrowed started snagging chairs and joining us at the table. At one point we are all seated and introductions were procured. They went around the table introducing themselves. When Wade introduced himself and I looked into his eyes as he said his name, time stopped. There was something that snagged my soul. He seemed familiar and yet I wanted and needed to know him. I was not drunk as I’d only had two drinks over many hours, so you skeptics can eliminate that suspicion. I was smitten. Over the evening, we flirted and finagled our way closer to one another, later dancing under the stars to whatever band was playing that year.
That summer was the quintessential summer romance, but as the summer progressed we could tell there was something deeper blooming. We have worked hard on this relationship, both challenging ourselves to grow more generous, more accepting, more reasonable, more loving. Times have been tough and wonderful, but more than anything I want to experience it with him. The years fly by and every moment encompasses the universe. It is grand. I look forward to twelve more years and twelve more and twelve more and on and on until I draw my last breath. Fittingly, today we bought a new bed. The journey has been a wonderful adventure as we write next to one another while the wee one coos and squeals behind us. I love you, my friend!
