There are people who know us in certain ways, they expect things of us, they don't expect us to do some of the things we do. We disappoint them, we surprise and delight them, we take their breath away, we enrage them, we move them unspeakably with an unforseen kiss that makes us whisper their name. They believe us to remain the way they always saw us. And some, those rare kindred spirits, will us to change, they lovingly push us onward, letting go of the pieces of us that must adapt, that must shift, that need to be pruned to make way for the fruit that's waiting to blossom. And those angels are ministers of love from the Divine Himself, they see the beauty others rejected, they love the brokenness we daily try and bury, they delight in who we are, who we are becoming. And we love them for that.
My dearest male counterpart called me last night for the first time in......several months. He is the consistently inconsistent psuedo boyfriend in my life that always contacts me but only ever in the most unpredictable moments. His standard of time is unlike any parameters set on by others. He marches to the drum in his own vortex. Yet always, year after year, he steps out of his solitude for moments with me. And I delight in every one.
I saw it was him calling and answered the phone, Holy crap! Well, how the hell are ya! He laughed and we picked up where the last five or so months had left off. I recounted my most recent debacle and he responded with his usual quip of scandalous. And further still, I like wholesome Teresa. Or at least the appearance of wholesome Teresa. And it made me smile. Hours earlier I had mused to my Impossibility that I was bad and that was why he loved me. That's not why I love you, he had said with surprising earnest. It's everything, it's that you're Resa, its summed up in that word. Resa. And the sincerity within his eyes said so much more than the words he was fumbling to utter.
My psuedo continued on with tales of his adventures, the places he'd traveled, the simplicity with which he relished. I don't want a family and I don't want another great love in my life. I just want a sailboat. And he promised to take me on it someday. I reminded him that in spite of the trend of the men I encountered he was the one, the minority I could count on one hand that I had never had romantic entanglements with. That's because I want to be able to have this conversation with you, he laughed. And isn't that tragically how it always goes? To possess someone entirely, to love with an unbridled passion destroys the complacency of a platonic friendship. We gain so much for a moment and lose everything for the rest of the story. And always we're haunted by the question of whether or not it was worth it.
But in remembrance, we know, it most assuredly was.
You would get bored with me, my Impossibility had tried to reassure me. And I marvelled over the contradiction with which we try to make others love us and simultaneously forget us. Love is a frighteningly powerful, unpredictable force. And its existence often rattles us. We are unsure of whether to bathe in it or bottle it up to place on the shelf. Like an accident we're forced to drive by, we must look at it, we are implored to see what's passing us by, but its shining eyes make us so high we forget what we were before it fell into our laps.
I hadn't prayed in a long time and I prayed for you the other night, he had confessed. Truly in all things, He wants to draw us nearer to Him. He works all things for His good because we love Him and are called according to His purpose. And even in our falterings He allows us to feel the love from another during our wisp of a vapor of time so we can delight in an inkling of the love He waits to pour into us, the love that overflows through us, that meets every desire and need, the love we freely give to everyone, the love we blissfully shared with our fantasy.
He had remembered what I'd said to him two weeks prior and was quoting my writing to me. Being captured in someones mind even after the tears and the scars have faded from the boxes we slammed our hands through is humbling, it is intoxicating, it reddens my cheeks and turns my eyes down toward my nervous hands. This enduring love fights on and we both smile, knowing, accepting, trusting in ways no one else understands. And we're ok with that.
Only one other seemed to possess this kind of a fighting love but he ran away and took his love with him so I no longer see it reflected in his nervous eyes. I've never understood how I could be so comfortable around someone who still makes me so nervous, he had told me.
Some people see you in ways you never saw yourself.
Handsome.
Ideal.
Strong.
Different, assuredly better.
Unforgettable.
And still you invaded their heart, their mind, a piece of them was given to you with tender, caring hands.
And it's wrapped around your neck, radiating within.
And it has changed you.
And you will never give that up.
It is yours and yours alone.
I see all you were too shy to embody.
I taste every loving kiss I never received.
I hear the sighs of discontent and cries of rage you utter in solitude.
I smell the intoxication of the perfume of your skin, the hands that caressed me with a tenderness I forgot men possessed.
I know all that could be yet won't, all that shouldn't be but is, all that is mine not hers, that none can diminish, not you, not my next love, not my former.
Mine and yours was ours for those moments, for that chapter.
This is my movie.
And I am the star.
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