Transition Points

After the demise of my marriage, I had a very clear picture of what I wanted. I wanted to live a beautiful life on my own. I wanted to paint my walls green and use my pretty pink and green tulip dishes for every meal, enjoying the girliness of them. I wanted to camp out on my couch in the middle of the night watching reruns of Grey’s Anatomy and Sex and the City and lame chick porn with its goofy storylines. I wanted to read books in bed and not worry about the light keeping someone else up. I wanted to make my own mess and clean it whenever I felt like it rather than cleaning someone else’s messes. I wanted to be on my own, to be the mistress of my own castle.It’s not that I hated men and didn’t want their companionship. I liked men and thought it would be nice to date one. But with boundaries. My ideal relationship was dating someone who lived way far on the other side of town–you know, someone who was in the vicinity but not close enough for me to have to see him every day. Seeing each other three or four times a month seemed good. We could go on dates, have sex, share stories . . . and then return to living our separate, independent, fulfilling lives.

It sounded so . . . perfect.

And then there was Nico.

I don’t believe there’s such a thing as soul mates, yet I swear he’s mine. He is home. No other person has ever felt like home to me, but he does. I so never expected that.

And so, inevitably, the transition point of our relationship approached. You know, the idea of commitment, and, gasp, perhaps living together.

We *barely* scratched the surface of the conversation, but it was enough to freak me the hell out.

I had a series of commitment nightmares. In the first, I was pregnant and Nico asked me to marry him . . . and I surprised myself by saying yes, surprised myself even more with how much I loved the idea of being with him. And then, he said something to my kids about us deciding to get married and I freaked out. In the dream, and when I awoke from my dream. I think I had a minor panic attack when I woke up, and it took me several hours to recover.

In the next dream, Nico and I wound up at a wedding reception, and the bride and her friend performed a dance in these awful sequined outfits. It was like a bad junior high cheerleading squad. Nico walked past the bride, mid-dance, and said a comment about how she didn’t look *that* much like a drag queen. And I laughed, at Nico and at the farce of marriage.

In the final dream, Nico and I did get married, but in the chaos following the ceremony we couldn’t find any time to be us anymore because everyone was in our space. It was awful. Towards the end of the dream we did have one fleeting moment to snuggle, and I whispered in his ear that I loved having him in my mouth (well, it’s true; I do), but there was no way we could do anything approaching sex because the wedding had infringed upon all that.

No, we surely did not talk at all about marriage, but I think marriage is emblematic for me of commitment and all the things that can go wrong with it, and that’s why it kept popping up in my dreams. I find myself wanting, so wanting to be with Nico . . . and it petrifies me because it contradicts all that I thought I wanted and because I know that there are so many things that can go wrong in a relationship. I mean, what if we move in together and I wind up resenting him because he never puts his laundry away?

I decided to listen to myself; if I’m freaking out, it’s clear that I need to take some time and breathe for awhile. There’s no rush, anyway. No reason to hurry things.

And then today Nico got called for a job interview. With the county attorney’s office. You know, in MY town, not his.

He’d submitted the application awhile ago, and the job process moves incredibly slowly in his field.

I had so many reactions. I was amazed that he’d applied for a job in my town in the early months of our relationship just because I was here (he HATES, HATES this city). He hadn’t ever mentioned it, I guess because one never knows how things will turn out with these applications, so I’d had no idea that before I’d even started to think about moving to Metropolis that he was thinking about moving here.

But I was also a little panicked. Not with the idea of being with him, but with the idea of NOT being with him. I’ve been making plans to move to Metropolis, and the thought of moving there, without him being there, seemed so unfathomable.

Okay, I’m laughing at myself and all the panic as I write it out. It isn’t like me to freak out so much, lol.

I think the bottom line is this: moving into a commited relationship with someone scares the snot out of me after my marriage. But the thought of not moving in that direction with Nico scares me even more.

Because I love him and he’s home. And it’s not very often that a girl finds her home when she wasn’t even looking for it.

I think it’s time I had the “it scares the hell out of me but I want to be with you” talk with Nico 🙂

Man, I wish there was vodka in that cranberry juice

Owwww.

When you’re in a long-distance relationship, you tend to have a *lot* of sex with your partner when you do get to see each other.

Especially if your boyfriend greets you at the door looking handsome as hell in a suit.

Nico’s got a tie-wearing sort of job, but when I see him he tends to be in his comfort clothes, big comfy t-shirts and shorts. So to see him dressed up, just for me . . . yeah, there was going to be a lot of sex.

He took me to a restaurant where a meal costs as much as I spend on groceries each week (man, we have vastly different careers) and first we sat at the bar and drank martinis . . . then we drank a bottle of delicious Argentinean wine with dinner . . . and then we went back to his house and drank more wine . . . yeah, there was going to be a lot of sex.

So much so that I passed out from happy exhaustion.

That was just the start. We had this weird moment of cosmic alignment where the oddest thing happened–we actually got to see each other for five days. In a row!

So we had “I finally get to see you” sex, and then, as the last day neared, “I’m not going to see you for awhile 😦 ” sex.

In short, there was sex.

Did you know that a lot of sexual activity can lead to urinary tract infections? Oh god.

I seriously haven’t been this miserable since I was a kid and had horrifically painful chronic UTIs due to an odd disorder–my urethra was twisted up like a pretzel. A surgeon fixed it right up and freed me from that misery for thirty years. Til now.

God I am miserable.

Nico feels terrible. Like most men, he knew nothing about sex sometimes leading to UTIs. I think he even looked it up on WebMD (which I find rather cute). I wish he was in town to hold me and stroke my hair and bring me more cranberry juice.

But, dear heaven, there’s no way in hell I’d have sex with him if he was here.

Shake and Run, Part Two

More than anything, I hate it when words fail me. Words are my trade, after all, and when I can’t gather them to work for me at the moments I need them I feel like the fabric of my universe has come unstitched.

That’s how I felt when Nico walked back into the room.

Even to myself now I can’t explain the intense, visceral aversion I had to seeing Nicole’s name on the inhaler on the coffee table. I can’t explain how seeing a name was so horrific that it made me have to flee the house, posthaste.

And I certainly couldn’t explain it to Nico in that moment.

He could tell as soon as he saw me that something was drastically wrong and started asking questions as he walked toward where I was standing by the door.

My voice was shaky, and my body was probably shaky too.

“I made the mistake of looking at your coffee table,” I sputtered out, “and saw Nicole’s hair tie and inhaler. I feel like I just had sex with you in your girlfriend’s house.”

Illogical or no, that’s exactly how it felt. I’ve been dating Nico for ten months, and I think if I have my timelines right he broke up with Nicole about three weeks before that. I’ve been dating him for ten months, and yet there’s more evidence in his life of Nicole than there is of me . . . she lives in his city and sees him more often than I do. She’s slept at his house since we started dating far more times than I have. I had sex with him there on the couch, and then looked at the coffee table and saw her . . . and I felt the repulsion of other-womanhood, of fucking a guy that belongs to another woman in a space that is clearly hers. And the thought of being Nico’s other woman was more than I could bear. It’s one thing for a woman to choose to be a man’s mistress if that’s all she’s looking for from him, but, god, not with Nico. I want his love and his heart.

See, I’m typing that paragraph and realizing how emotive it sounds, and how much of a stretch it seems to go from seeing an inhaler to seeing yourself unjustly placed in the role of the other woman . . . and I realize why Nico looked at me the way he did.

Nico’s face was incredulous. Actually, it was god, this woman is fucking crazy. “Alright, if that’s the way you feel, go then,” he said.

“Nico, don’t,” I said, voice still shaking.

I didn’t want him just to dismiss me and my feelings as some insanity that he didn’t even want to try to understand. Because, god help me, I’m too idealistic, too hopeful in the power of communication. My work as a scholar is all about rhetorical listening, getting through difference by really listening to and understanding the perspectives of others, and it’s not just some bullshit I use in my research–I really believe in this power.

I believed that if I could explain to Nico that it wasn’t an inhaler and a hair tie that freaked me out, but that it was Nicole crashing our first date and him leaving me early on Thanksgiving weekend so that he could pick Nicole up from the airport and him canceling a trip down to see me two hours before he was supposed to be here because Nicole decided she wanted to sort out the last of their mutual bills that day and Nicole texting him about wanting to come by to visit the dog when I was there to spend Valentine’s weekend with him and Nicole moving in for two weeks that turned into a month when she had roommate issues and Nicole staying at his house for six fucking days when her air conditioning was broken and Nicole dropping by his house at least a couple times a week after work to have beers with him and Nicole still having and using an opener to his garage and Nicole calling and texting him multiple times every day and him inadvertently using plural pronouns like we, our, and us rather than I, my, and me when talking about his (or their) dog when we were at dinner with another couple Saturday night . . . I thought that if I explained that the inhaler and hair tie were just a piece in a long, twisted chain that he’d understand why seeing a couple of things on a coffee table would intensely trigger my flight response.

LOL, I earnestly believed that if I’d just explained it, that he’d understand and that he’d hug me and tell me he was sorry that he’d placed me in a difficult position.

God, that’s hilarious.

I searched for words, bumbling my way through that long laundry list I just rambled for all of you but with only minuscule coherence.  He didn’t get it.

“Why wouldn’t her stuff be on the coffee table? She just stayed here through Saturday.”

“I used plural first-person pronouns? What??”

“How could you look at that coffee table and see a girl? No girl would have giant cup stain in the middle like that.”

“Do you want me to go through the house and scoop up all her stuff into a box?  Would that make you happy?”

Oh, and when I said something about how there’s no way it would take six freakin’ days to get an air conditioner fixed in a city teeming with air conditioning companies, he didn’t understand that I was questioning that whore Nicole rather than him and got defensive: “How could you say that? I was down there with you for most of those days!”

He was defensive, and his defensiveness is of a style that I’m not used to working with in a relationship. He makes jokes. Not disarming jokes that lighten the tension, but rather jokes that underhandedly attack. He’s employing his joke defense, and I’m there trying to explain that there’s no need to be defensive because I’m not attacking him; I just want to show him where I’m coming from. Then again, the fact that he was defensive indicates that he realizes that there’s something about his relationship with Nicole that isn’t right.

I left without him ever really hearing me. Yes, my words had failed me, but his ears had failed him too.

I was just working on a paragraph in a dissertation chapter today. “There cannot be true rhetorical listening,” I wrote, “if only the marginalized are required to listen. Both parties must equally share the responsibility of listening for cross-cultural dialogues to create understanding and change.” Yes, the wording needs to be tinkered with, but the concepts hold some weight. Here I’ve been, all along, doing the bulk of the listening, yet the conversation cannot go anywhere unless the other party is willing to take equal responsibility for listening.

We haven’t really talked much since the incident on Monday, but I did see him briefly yesterday. My kids and I were up in Metropolis and we got a bit messier at the splash park than I’d intended. I texted Nico to see if it would be okay for me to drop by and get a change of clothes.

“Of course you can,” he texted back.

I was halfway to his house when he texted me again, “Nicole’s coming by to get her dishes, just so you know.”

LOL, of course she was. You know, because when she stayed at his house for six days I’m sure she didn’t have time to go through the kitchen cabinets and get the last of her shit out.

The lovely, lovely thing was seeing that Nicole got it. She was totally conscious of the fact that it was fucked up for her to be in her ex-boyfriend’s home while he’s dating someone else. She scrambled into the house like a rat fearful of being killed, said hello to me and mumbled, “I’m so sorry. He said I could come get my dishes,” then scurried into the kitchen. I know I shouldn’t have enjoyed it so much, but it was really beautiful to see a woman with perfectly highlighted and straightened hair, a fresh French manicure, a $200 silk shirt and $650 Jimmy Choo’s fearfully scurry from a flip-flop shod woman fresh from a day of playing with her kids in the park, face free of make-up and hair pulled back into a pony tail.

She and Nico went into the kitchen and worked on pulling out dishes and boxing them up and then, when the boxing was done, she quickly shuffled passed me again and apologized.

LOVED it. She’s a total whore for making Nico’s house her own whenever she feels like it when I’m not around, especially when confronted with me she feels so guilty that all she can do is apologize and scurry, not to mention the fact that she managed to buy stilettos from the fall 2010 line but somehow couldn’t get around to paying the emergency charges to get her air conditioning fixed in one day instead of six, but with all that evil she was just so entertaining to watch as my mere presence in the house freaked her the hell out. I wish I had video to post.

Nicole gets it, but Nico doesn’t. I haven’t talked to him since I left his house right after Nicole scurried away, and I’m not sure when I will talk to him.  Honestly, I don’t have anything to say to someone who isn’t able to listen.

That was an interesting way to wake up

This morning my orgasm woke me up.

Nico and I had stayed up late talking on the phone, finding ourselves in one of our playful-silly-sexy moods, the kind where we had each other laughing yet craving one another. We finally said goodnight close to 1AM and I fell asleep thinking about him.

I continued to think about him in my sleep. As morning neared, I was dreaming about him. We were on the roof of his pub (because, apparently, dream-Nico owns a pub) and soon enough we were having sex . . . and as I came in my dream, I actually came in real life.

That’s never, never happened to me before. I’d read that there was a female equivalent to a wet dream, but I’d never experienced it.

Sometimes I fear that I look like a walking cliche, the (slowly) approaching-forty woman who finds her sexuality awakened late in life. The woman who, finally freed from a bad marriage, drinks in her new-found sexual pleasure frenetically. Maybe I am a cliche; I don’t know. All I know for sure is that during all those long, lonely years of my marriage, the plotlines of every single one of my sex dreams somehow managed to get disrupted right before penetration. Even in my dreams I didn’t have a good sex life! But now I have a sexual partner with whom I have some amazing physical chemistry, and our sexual relationship is so incredible that he makes me orgasm when he’s two hours away and I’m fast asleep.

If that’s a cliche, I’m happy to be living it.

Nico makes Demi cry

I climbed into bed at 8:20PM. This, my friends, NEVER happens; I’m a bit of a night owl. I was just *so* tired. Earlier in the afternoon I had passed out while I was sitting next to my son on the couch as he played X-box. And he is the loudest video game player on Earth.

Anyway, I went to bed at 8:20, and I didn’t wake up until 6:40 . . . after my alarm had been going off for twenty minutes.

I woke up to one of the most painful sore throats ever.

******

After I got moving and hunted down some throat lozenges, I texted Nico. I told him about my sore throat and made an off-color joke about not being able to swallow (because even when I’m in pain I refuse to lose my sense of humor!).

And he texted me back, offering to bring me ice cream.

Again, I joked with him–it didn’t make any sense for him to drive 120 miles to bring me ice cream when I could drive a quarter of a mile to get it myself.

“I’ll be there at 4 :)” he texted. And I cried.

******

I am perfectly capable of driving around the corner to Safeway to get myself some ice cream. I’m a rather self-sufficient woman (to a fault, at times). Maybe it’s that self-sufficiency that has caused me to attract complete fuck-ups over the years, men whose lives are in such chaos that they look to me to take care of them and make everything okay.

I’ve never been with a man who doesn’t want or need me to rescue him, someone who wants to take care of me (yet respects my ability to take care of myself).

That is until now. I hadn’t realized how much I yearned for someone to want to watch out for me until Nico made me cry by doing just that.

I *SO* Should Have Broken up with Him Sooner . . .

. . . because things are going well. Shockingly well.

I don’t know; maybe it’s that free spirit of “I don’t know what I want and I’m totally okay with telling you so” that changed things for us. There’s this strong and confident vibe I’ve been carrying around with me . . . and, funnily enough, men everywhere are responding to it. Honest to god, I haven’t been hit on as much, EVER, as I have been in the past two weeks.  My girlfriends have been noticing it, marveling at how much men are falling all over themselves for me. It’s super odd . . . but fun. I’ve been a good girl, though . . . well, except for dancing with a hot guy with the thickest biceps I’ve had the pleasure to touch in a great while. Otherwise, I’ve totally been a (slightly flirtatious but) good girl 😉

Nico, too, has caught the bug. He’s just so into me lately 🙂 Things have been so really, really good between us. Awesome, even. I’m still being rather honest and upfront with him (I told him about the guy I danced with . . . though I may have left out the bit about the biceps, lol), but it’s working for us.

I was just flipping through my phone’s mailbox, and there are tons of amazingly sweet messages from Nico there. About how much he misses me and how much he adores me and how much he’s crazy about me and how he loves how much I make him laugh and how he thinks about me all the time and how his heart hurts because I’m not there and how he wishes I was there and how he can’t wait to see me next week.

But it’s more than just sweet text messages filling up my inbox. There’s this . . . intimacy there between us now. I guess that’s the right word for it. We’ve always been so incredibly comfortable with each other, but this is different. It’s a couple-y kind of intimacy. It’s like he decided in that interim period that he really wanted to be with me and has taken claim to that . . . I suppose in the same way I’ve taken claim to my uncertainty. It makes us far better together than we were before.

While I may be comfortably unsure about what kind of relationship I want us to have, I am definitely sure about one thing: I’m really crazy about Nico.

The other day we had this interesting conversation. I told him that he’s my favorite–it’s part of our couple-speak, one of those loving things we always say to each other. And instead of following along with our typical script, he said, “I’m your favorite? How the hell did that happen?! Have you seen you? What they hell are you doing wasting your time on a guy like me?”

He said it jokingly but with a noticeable underlying seriousness. I responded in the same jokingly serious tone, “I’ll have you know I have very refined, very particular tastes, mister. I require wit, intelligence, an awesome sense of humor, kindness, an incisive ability to make fun of stupid people, a bit of cantankerousness, laughter, sex, and above all, someone who takes me just the way I am. Do you have any clue how rare it is to find that all in someone?”

I interrupted before he could speak, “Oh, and a good sense of sarcasm should be on that list too. And gorgeous eyes. And someone who makes a girl feel at home every time she’s near him.”

“You are so sweet!” he said, and then he moved into joking mode, which what he and I do. “I have three of the things on the list. What’s your minimum?”

“Hmm. I don’t know; I’m pretty demanding. Which three things do you have?”

He listed out a few, then explained that he’d had the gorgeous eyes, too, but that there had been a horrible shampoo accident that morning.

I feigned begrudgingly accepting him with just the three traits, but only because he had the most important one (“taking you just as you perfectly are,” as he put it). Then we moved on to something else–I can’t really remember exactly what–when I interrupted whatever that conversation was to say, “And you know the actual answer to your ‘why me’ question is *because* it’s you, right? There is this inexplicable somethingness about you that I find unquantifiably . . . perfect. I always have.”

I made him blush . . . and grin. SO awesome to be able to make a man who never blushes blush. “You’re my favorite!” he exclaimed.

And right now, simply being each other’s favorites is perfect. Better than perfect.

And Demi folds.

A weekend with my boyfriend. There just weren’t words to describe our excitement. All week long we kept texting each other, “Is it Friday yet?” And then, magically, there it was.

I got to Metropolis Friday morning and sat through some meetings, anxiously waiting for them to finish so that I could see my man. I called him the second I was done and he told me where to meet him. I drove an hour through the rush-hour traffic and got to him . . . and his brother. Huh, okay. I was expecting to have some special alone time, since we hadn’t seen each other in a couple of weeks, but okay. I could hang with his brother.

The three of us were sitting at the bar, chatting and having beer, when Nico’s cell phone rang. “Hey lady . . . yes, I’m having beer. Wanna join us? . . . Are you in Metropolis? . . . No, well then you can’t join us.”

A few minutes passed, and then he ended his phone call with his ex-wife.

Now, I knew he was friends with Anna. I mean, she’s a friend of mine (though not a close one). And they were married in their early twenties, and it didn’t even last a year because she cheated on him, so it’s not like he was chatting with a recent flame. But I never knew until that moment that they were “call up and chat on Friday afternoons” close. The fact that they were that kind of close didn’t bother me; it was more that he’d never bothered to mention it that did.

We tabbed out, then headed to the grocery store to get some things for dinner. His phone vibrated as we walked through the produce section, and he texted back in response.

“Nicole wanted to know if she could come over to visit the dog,” he told me. “I told her that Demi and I were about to make dinner, so it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Awkward! I actually texted that: ‘AWKWARD!'”

I was dumb-founded. Why the hell was her dog still living at his house? (Apparently she couldn’t have it at the house she’s renting, so Nico was keeping it until she bought a house.) And . . . dog visitation? Really? I wondered how often she came by his house to visit her damn dog.

We went to his house, had sex and had dinner . . . and my compassionate animal-lover self toyed with thoughts of poisoning the dog that kept my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend coming to the house they used to share.

****

I kept waking up in the night, my brain too busy in thought for me to stay asleep. Was this really what I wanted?

****

Morning came and Nico went to the store to get some things for breakfast. I took a shower and then hunted around for a hair dryer. I didn’t find a hair dryer, but I did see that one of Nicole’s curling irons was still hanging out under the sink. That two of her purses were still on the top shelf of Nico’s closet. That pairs of her sandals and flip flops were still on his closet floor. That a pair of her sunglasses was still on a shelf in the living room.

Nico came back and whipped up breakfast for us. After we ate, we went to sit on the back porch.

His phone vibrated, and he texted back. Vibrated again, and texted again. Texting and texting. I wanted to know who he was talking to. Was it one of his buddies? Or Anna? Or Nicole?

Then a call came through, and it was his mother. I started to feel silly for wondering about his texts; I mean, they could have been as innocent as this call from his mother.

I got his pieces of the conversation and could tell his mom was asking about Nicole. “She’s looking at some houses on Monday,” he said. Well, at least she was doing something that would get her stupid dog out of my boyfriend’s house and into a house of her own, I thought.

And then his mom tried to get him to come down to the town where she and I both live for the weekend. “Nope, I’m gonna stay here and sit on my ass,” he said. She must have asked something about who he was going to be spending the weekend with, because he joked, “I have my imaginary friends.”

He hung up and I asked, “So, am I an imaginary friend?” He laughed back at me and tried to explain about her trying to get him to come down and visit. He just seemed to think the whole thing was funny, but I sat in wonder, processing the fact that he didn’t tell his mother that he wouldn’t be coming down to visit because the woman he’d been dating for about five months had come to town to visit him.

His dryer buzzed and he got up to tend to his laundry. He left his phone on the table. I had the overpowering urge to grab it and look through his messages. And I hated myself for so wanting to do something I so hated.

****

We went down by the university to have drinks with one of Nico’s friends and his girlfriend. Well, even if he was hiding me from his mom, at least he wasn’t hiding me from his friends. Afterwards Nico and I headed back to his house. He sat down in his recliner, and I climbed up onto his lap. I needed to talk with him. I couldn’t just let all my insecurities haunt my brain and keep me up at night. Nope, I needed to be straight-forward and talk to him about it.

And so I started asking questions, about how he felt the relationship was going for him, about whether or not he was happy. He had positive answers that seemed to lack much depth at all. I was trying to dig, and he was staying at the surface.

So I decided to go a different direction–instead of asking him about where he was at, I would open up about where I was at. I started by telling him I loved him.

And his response . . . I can’t remember all the words, exactly, but it was the equivalent to “that’s wonderful!”

Huh. I stopped trying to dig into conversation there.

****

I decided to go back home a day early. I just didn’t see the point of staying there in that house anymore, surrounded by little reminders of Nicole, with a guy whose response to my love was “yay!” rather than “I love you, too.”

He walked me to my car and I leaned over my open door to hug him and kiss him goodbye. I told him I was crazy about him. And he said–I got the words down for this one–“That’s awesome.” Seriously. That was his response.

I got into my car, and before I even made it to the end of his street, I felt the anger start to bubble over like lava. “Awesome? FUCK HIM.” I yelled aloud in my car. I drove toward the freeway on-ramp, but found myself pulling over in an empty lot, farm land that had been bulldozed for new homes, instead of going on to the freeway.

This wasn’t me. I’m not the paranoid girl who wants to snoop in her boyfriend’s phone, I’m not the angry girl who curses her boyfriend the second she’s away from him.

I realized I didn’t want to be in a situation that made me act like someone I didn’t recognize.

So there in that lot I decided to fold my hand. I don’t think I’ve walked away from the table yet–maybe when the dealer gets his shit together I’ll let him deal me another hand–but there was nothing more I could do to play this hand. I’m amazing, but even I can’t do much with a hand of ex issues and intimacy barriers.

I thought about turning the car around to go back and tell him my decision, but I pulled out my phone instead. Somehow a text message seemed a much more fitting way to fold.

My boyfriend almost died for new year’s

I thought I was just being paranoid as I worried that something was really wrong. I kept trying to talk myself out of it. His battery just died or he lost his phone, I told myself.

Except, I wasn’t buying it. And it was driving me crazy.

I kept my phone at the ready, desperate to hear something. I kept it on my lap as a drove and checked it at every stop light, just in case I hadn’t heard it or felt its vibrations. Which of course I would have.

By the time I pulled into the parking lot of Bentley’s House of Coffee yesterday afternoon I was talking to myself. “Where the fuck are you, —” I said, calling him my his last name, a carryover from our years as great friends that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake. Where was he?

When I was about halfway through my chai latte with soy milk, my phone, which I had sitting on the table in waiting, vibrated with a text.

He was in the hospital.

I never realized how deadly a flu bug could be to someone who’s had a kidney transplant. The virus he came down with on Tuesday night left him so severely dehydrated that his one functioning kidney shut down. Renal failure from the flu.

The good thing is that he’ll live; in fact, he was just released from the hospital. Thank Apollo and Diancecht and Nikko-Bosatsu and whatever other god of health and healing you want to worship.

One of my good friends tried to be all philosophical about it, talking about how this experience was good because it taught me how much I love Nico. The thing is, though, my friend is wrong. I already knew how much I love him and his almost-death did nothing to shift that. It did, however teach me a few things. It taught me to trust my gut, to blow off logic and trust my intuition when it comes to the man I love.

And it also taught me that if we have to live in separate towns for another six months, I’m going to make sure that every freakin’ friend of his in his town has my number in their cell phone and knows to CALL ME if ANYTHING happens to my boy ever again.

The Gift(s) I Gave My Boyfriend for Christmas

What do you give for a first Christmas? I struggled to figure it out. Mr. Nico and I have been together for about three months–long enough that a Christmas present would be appropriate, but short enough that the present should not be extravagant. Besides, he’s not really a holiday sort of person, anyway (holidays were just giant dysfunction-fests in his family, so he’s not a big fan).

I walked through store after store, and nothing seemed quite right. I knew that any sort of traditional present just wouldn’t fit him, fit us.

And then the idea struck me. I got online, searched for about thirty minutes, then finally found it–our candy.

When I moved back into the state a few years ago, we started hanging out at a particular restaurant’s lounge with our friends. Mr. Nico and I would always drink Guinness, and if my glass was ever empty, he would always share his with me. The best part, though, was the candy. Instead of mints, the hostess’ desk always had a bowl of the most delicious key lime candies. They were hard and tangy and creamy all at once. Throughout the night we’d steal as many as we could as we went past the bowl and bring them back to our table.

So many times Mr. Nico would bite his candy in half and share one half with me. I guess it might sound like a strange intimacy–a couple of “just friends” sharing candy from one another’s mouths–but there was always that sort of intimacy between us.

Whenever I’d go up to his town and see him, I’d bring pilfered candies along with me from the times I’d gone to that bar without him.

But the restaurant closed at the beginning of the year. There were no more lime candies for us to steal.

And so I bought my boyfriend a big ass bag of key lime candies for Christmas. It was the perfect gift.

*********

I wasn’t expecting that I’d give him another gift for Christmas, though. We were in our separate towns–something that is becoming increasingly frustrating–and texted each other here and there in between our various Christmas activities. Throughout the day I kept thinking about next Christmas, thinking about how much I wanted to spend it with him. I’ve been thinking about such future things all the time lately, ever since I realized how much I want those future things, and it’s left me feeling both excited and scared as hell.

It’s like I’ve only been breathing quick, shallow breaths lately because that excitement and fear has been crushing my lungs, threatening to burst right through my chest. I’ve been dizzy from the lack of oxygen. But more than anything, I’ve had these two overpowering feelings of “Oh my god, I love him,” and “Oh my god, I need to tell him how I feel.”

Telling how I feel didn’t seem necessary up until now. I mean, we’re Nico and Demi, the two who wordlessly share one another’s Guinness and candy. There always was that unspoken intimacy between us–speaking it just seemed redundant.

But I was going to tell him. Not necessarily those three words, but all the other things to put what those three words mean into context. And because words are what I do, I was planning them out, scripting in my head all that I would tell him the next time I saw him.

And then he made it so I had to throw out that long freakin’ script.

He called me Christmas night at about 1 AM:

“I miss you,” he said.

“I was just laying in bed, wide freakin’ awake, thinking the same thing,” I said.

He teased me about my crazy sleep patterns, then told me about his Christmas with a bunch of Icelandic people.

I laughed. It just struck me as funny. I told Mr. Nico that I imagined them all in wool sweaters.

And then he laughed because they *were* in wool sweaters. This is what we do; we make each other laugh. It’s what I love best about us.

We joked more about his Icelandic Christmas. He said he only knew enough Icelandic to ask where the the bathroom was and ask for beer.

“And really, that’s all you need to know,” I said.

“I know! Anything else is just gravy,” he said.

“In my head ‘gravy’ was is quotation marks and is the word you use for anything in Icelandic you don’t know the words for.”

He laughed. “I miss you so much.”

“Me too me too me too. So much it scares me.”

“Why scared?”

“See, I knew you would ask that and yet I still don’t have an answer for you. I need to dig around for the words for a bit.”

“Oh, damn. Now I’m predictable. Well shit.”

I laughed and made a conversational shift that might have been odd to others but is just normal for us. “In my head, I keep seeing you saying ‘gravy’ over and over again as you’re sitting around the dinner table with the sweater dudes. It makes me laugh.”

He laughed. “I did say ‘gravy’ a lot tonight.”

I shifted again. “It’s scary because I honestly never thought I’d feel this way ever again so it’s foreign and unexpected . . . kinda like one day magically appearing in Italy, which Italy rocks, but you feel a bit unsettled because you never even knew you were going there and you didn’t even pack a suitcase and you find yourself saying ‘gravy’ a lot as you try to learn the right words.”

Yes, I talk in run-on sentences when I’m trying to explain something.

His response caught me a little off guard . . . though I suppose it shouldn’t have. He’s always  called me on, well, everything, for as long as I’ve known him, so I don’t know why this would have been any different.

He laughed. “So are you saying you love me then?”

“I’m not sure I appreciate your laugher,” I playfully sparred back.

“For heaven’s sake, just appreciate it,” he replied.

“Yes, I love you.”

“Good,” his voice smiled.

“I didn’t say it wasn’t good; it’s just Italy-ish.”

He asked me about why I thought I’d never feel this again and I shared my logical reasons with him. And then he asked, “So you’re saying you re-love me? You love me again?”

“I re-love you? Not exactly.” I tried to find the words. This was the boy who I’d fallen in love with in my thirteen-year-old sort of way the summer before our sophomore year of high school. This was the boy that in my sixteen-year-old sort of way I decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with our junior year of high school. This was the man who’d been my loyal friend and secret-keeper over the past several years.

“I’ve always loved you. That love has just taken different forms over the years.”

“I don’t think I can respond to that on the phone,” he said. “I need to look at you and touch you for the proper response.”

And the thing was, I didn’t need him to respond. For the first time in weeks, I could breathe, my lungs full now that the shallow breaths were gone.

No, I’m not moving to Metropolis . . . except, I am

Since Mr. Nico and I started dating, I’ve had to listen to more than my share of people’s presumptions about how my new relationship will affect my future.

“So, will you be looking for a job in Metropolis when you finish your PhD?”

“When are you moving in with Mr. Nico in Metropolis?”

“You should marry him.”

Ugh and ugh and ugh. I’m glad everyone seems to think that our relationship is a good enough thing that they want to plan out my future with Mr. Nico, but geeze, people, as much as I love him, I wasn’t about to give up all the goals and dreams I had for myself just to move myself to his town.

Except, funny thing–now I am planning to move to Metropolis.

My children are exceptional; they share the same developmental disability (one mild, one severe). The city I live in now is a horrible place for someone to have their disability. Just to get into a developmental specialist to get an initial diagnosis was a nine-month wait. There are wait-lists for speech therapists and occupational therapists and feeding therapists and sensory integration therapists. On top of that, the schools here, for the most part, pretty much suck when it comes to dealing with students with special needs.

But Metropolis has resources. I’ve driven up there many a time to take my sons to developmental specialists. Their speech therapist is based out of Metropolis. And one of the leading research and resource centers for their disability is in Metropolis.

I still wasn’t planning to move there, though, until I started doing some serious investigation about my sons’ schooling. Their current school district is rather unenlightened about how to work with kids who have disabilities. They tossed my older son in a mainstream classroom WITH NO SUPPORTS, and they tossed my younger son in a self-contained classroom with no opportunity to interact with typical peers. The district seems to only see two black and white choices rather than seeing inclusion as a continuum.

I want my children’s school experiences to mirror the diversity they will see in our culture. You know, there just isn’t a self-contained Walmart for people with disabilities. My sons need to learn social interaction skills for the world they inhabit, and they need supports to learn how to function in that world. And, research shows that inclusion leads to higher performance for all children–those with disabilities and those without.

So I did more research, and three places kept  popping up as exceptional models of inclusion: one in Michigan, one in Oregon . . . and one in Metropolis.

It’s actually the school district I used to teach in, back when I got my first teaching job out of college. Five years ago a visionary came in and radically redesigned the district’s approach to students with special needs. Institutional change is difficult, and it got so challenging at times that a pile of manure was actually left on his desk once. Yet he continued to push for change, and the result is a school district that values diversity and refuses to place children with disabilities in the category of the “other.”

I want that for my kids. And because of that, I’ve noticed my dreams starting to change.

I thought I wanted to end up as some bad-ass scholar at a Research I school. You know, somewhere where I could be extraordinarily brilliant. But being a bad-ass scholar just doesn’t seem as important as it was before. Other things seem more important.

Like having access to great doctors for my children.

Like ensuring my children have the best education possible.

Like using my scholarship to make a difference for my children and others in the disability community.

Metropolis is the best place for me to do all that. So I’m moving 🙂

And being able to have sex with my boyfriend on a regular basis will be a fabulous fringe benefit.