I’m daydreaming again. There’s just something about this place that makes dreaming so easy.

29 08 2011

I can see it now, babe, our life together.

Like the first morning I wake up with you. There will be that odd feeling at first, you know: disorientation. Something’s different, I think to myself behind closed eyes, still sleepy but puzzled. Then it dawns on me.

“Oh my God,” I gasp out loud. ”I’m married.”

Wide awake now, I turn my head to find you beside me, smiling. You’re trying not to laugh, I can tell.

“Good morning,” you whisper, in that voice that I’ve had the biggest crush on from the start.

“I’m your wife,” I inform you, like this is news somehow.

You give up on holding the chuckles back.

“Yes,” you laugh, pulling me close. “And I’m your husband.”

That vital piece of information gets lost in the pleasure of snuggling deeper into your arms. My favorite place in the world, sweetly familiar on this life-changing day.

“It feels strange,” I admit to your chest, the only part of you that I can see. You’re holding me so tightly I couldn’t look up, but I don’t want any space between us. Not even the tiniest bit.

“Being married?”

“Yeah,” I sigh, but the feeling is wearing off as I focus on the beat of your heart. Another familiar thing.

“Bad strange?” you ask, ready to reassure me. You’ve always done that, calmed me down when I over think myself into a panic. You’ve talked down my walls until the only thing keeping me safe is the certainty that you will never, never, never take your love away.

I consider all of that, as well as your question, and I realize that there’s nothing to over think. This is you. This is us. We get to keep each other forever. And on the heels of that thought comes a great big booming burst of joy inside my chest. Fireworks, babe. Cheers and confetti and a big brass band. The biggest smile of my life growing inside my heart. I’m married. To you.

“No,” I say, wanting to jump up and bounce on the bed, except I don’t really want to leave your arms. “Wonderful strange. The bestest and happiest kind.” Can you feel my smile against your skin?

And then you turn my face up, and you see it for yourself, all the happiness in my eyes. It has to show — I don’t think my body can keep that much joy a secret. I don’t  mind. I want you to know all the deepest things written in my soul. I love you. I choose you. I choose you over fear, over self-protection, over doubt. I choose you for the rest of my life, for always. Completely. Irrevocably. No one else.

When you kiss me, I can feel those same words in every touch of your lips. All the words you’ve said over and over, even long before I was brave enough to say them back. I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. Never stop believing that I do.

As I start to lose myself, I realize one thing. Every morning, from this day forward, will begin like this. And suddenly, that doesn’t feel strange anymore. It feels right. It’s the rightest thing in the world, waking up beside you. It’s the only way I want to wake up for the rest of my life.

Until someday, my love.

Wait for me as I wait for you.


Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : For you, Future Mr. Right, Love, The Cuyo Detour

David

10 08 2011

You know what I found this morning, in a long-unopened compartment of my wallet? It was a letter from you, dated several years and a lifetime ago. Tucked into the folds were three balayong blossoms, dry and fragile from being pressed for so long. You loved me then, I remember. You recorded these promises for posterity, so that I can read them over and over again and know what I meant to you. And then you changed your mind.

Dammit, David. How can I still be hurting over this now? People’s hearts get broken every day. People get left behind, and people move on. So why the heck am I here, plenty of time and plenty of adventures later, crying over sheets of paper that no longer hold anything real? It’s not like I spent my days wallowing in heartbreak. Eventually, I stopped missing you or even thinking about you. I loved, I laughed, I engaged. I did things that matter. I grew up a little every day, and I stopped wanting you back. You are no longer a part of my life — most of the time.

But some days just catch me off guard. It could be the little details, like the sight of my own palm, messy with squiggles and lines whenever I write with a ballpoint pen. I can almost hear your exasperated laugh,  almost see you trying to figure out why the ink that should have landed on paper ended up on my hand instead.  Or it could be the big things, David, the wounds received in the process of living.  Somehow, every goodbye is still an echo of yours, every person walking away steps in your footprints until they are out of sight. And suddenly there would be tears flooding my throat all over again. After all this freaking time.

So here I am today, writing on tear-soaked paper, thinking that’s enough. That’s more than enough. I want to love again like I loved you, in spite of risk, in spite of fear. Loving you taught me just how much I could give and how far I can go, and I don’t want to lose that. I want to offer myself again to someone, the right someone. You didn’t stay, David, but someone else will. Someone else deserves this misguided intensity of emotion that I wasted on you, long after you didn’t want it anymore.

I’ve always been the one who remembers. In a way, I’ve come to accept that, the inability to really forget what was once important. The memories will remind me to be careful, but I could stand to let go of the souvenirs. It’s been over for so long. This is the part, I think, where I stop letting it hurt.


Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Categories : Love, Post A Week Challenge, Swirl of Thoughts, The Cuyo Detour

The other side of someday

9 05 2011

I want to watch the rain with you. I want to cuddle on the couch with a blanket, a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows, and you. We’ll open the window a little bit so that the smell of rain can come in, but I won’t be cold. With your arms around me, I’ll be in the safest place I’ve ever been, surrounded by your strength. It’s the only home I’ll ever need.

I want to go camping on the beach, on an island that we can have to ourselves. We’ll put up a tent and wake up early enough to catch the sunrise, and run on sand untouched by any other feet. At night, we’ll light a fire and watch the stars and the fireflies, but it’ll be the hardest thing in the world to think of wishes. What more can I ask for? You’re more than I ever dreamed I could have.

I want to walk with you, too, to everywhere and nowhere in particular. City sidewalks, lamp-lit boulevards, and long-forgotten trails — we’ll explore them together. We’ll duck into old secondhand book stores, try new cafes, or have a picnic under the trees. But the best part of these adventures won’t be how far we went, but the steps we took closer to each other. I’ll never get tired of discovering the man who won my heart.

But mostly, I just want to be with you. To hear you promise your love and trust that you mean it. To confess how I need you and know that vulnerability is okay. To look at you and see you looking at me and know that you’re thinking: “Wow. We really get to spend our lives together.” I’ll be thinking it, too. Because after all the false starts, babe, after all the wrong turns that broke my heart… I still believe you’ll come. I still believe you’ll find me.


Comments : 6 Comments »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : For you, Future Mr. Right, Love

And here I thought I was the only one who wrote letters to the future

25 02 2011

So there’s this guy. He has a blog. He writes to his future wife.

Even though I’ve written to my future husband several times, I didn’t think guys were into that, too.

He says things like, “I want to hear how you say my name… in various instances. I want to be able to tell that it is your favourite thing to say. And that it spills out over your lovely lips so damn naturally because you’ve been annoying your friends by saying it to them all the time.”

And  “I’d like to have kids. You know, with you. I can almost see already how it will unfold. I think our first baby will be a boy. And I’ll hope, with every ounce of my being, that when he finds someone to spend his life with, he’ll be half as lucky as I’ve been.”

I stayed awake the whole night reading. And afterwards, I still couldn’t sleep, because his words had peeled the protective crust off my heart, and all my deepest, most honest longings lay throbbing and naked on the surface.

I want to be loved like that. I want someone who will write letters on paper, and stage a sock puppet show when I’m sick, and promise me cupcakes for breakfast to get me to fall asleep at night. I want to share root beer popsicles, and cuddle in bed, and kiss while making dinner. I want to be cherished, not just needed.

And I need to love someone like that. Someone who will receive all the tenderness I have to offer and never stop seeing it as a gift. Someone who will let me give myself and find joy in the giving, because I’m not afraid that anything will be taken for granted.

Someone who will never make me feel invisible. Someone who will never let me go.

Just thinking about it makes me giddy.

Just thinking about it makes me terrified.

Because, who am I kidding, it’s one thing to write letters to the perfect girl, and it’s a completely different thing to meet…me.

I used to think waiting for the right man to come along was difficult. Now I know it’s gotta be harder when he finally comes. Because then I — the messy, complicated reality of me — would have to stand up to this man who’s been dreaming of his ideal girl all his life and say, “Hi. It’s me that you’ve been looking for.”

And, for all my imagination, I haven’t yet figured out what he will say to that.


Comments : 9 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , ,
Categories : For you, Future Mr. Right, Love, Singleness, Swirl of Thoughts

Eavesdropping

11 02 2011

The girl was Korean, long haired and beautiful, one of the foreign students in the university. He was an American, tall and lanky, with a backpack that bore the signs of wanderlust. The tricycle I was riding stopped outside the cafe, and they got in with me.

“These are the things you write about in a travel diary,” he said, gesturing to the inside of the cab attached to a motorcycle. “How it feels to ride something like this.”

“Do you have a travel diary?” she asked.

“No,” he answered, gazing at her. “But I think I’ll start one tonight.”

I kept my eyes on the passing scenery, pretending to be oblivious to their conversation. In the enforced intimacy of the vehicle, however, I couldn’t help but be drawn in. They didn’t seem to know each other very well, but they had unmistakable chemistry. He was falling for her, I realized, trying not to smile.

He stole a shot of her with his DSLR camera, making her laugh. She borrowed it and asked him to teach her so that she could take his picture, too. They bantered back and forth, and it was light and sweet and a little corny — perfect, in other words. The kind of conversation that you lie awake at night remembering until you fall asleep with a smile.

Listening to them discreetly, I thought, this is what I miss. I still shy away from the idea of passion – the grand, deep, complicated vulnerability of an intimate connection with someone. But the openness to possibilities, the willingness to be enchanted by another human being — I miss that. If only I could have the fascination without the fall…but I can’t. One always follows the other for me, so I choose distance. Distance is safe, while I wait for courage.

But when the tricycle stopped at the seaside boulevard, I watched as he helped her down and didn’t let go of her hand. The odds were against them ending up with a happily ever after, but it didn’t seem to matter. Tonight they would walk hand in hand by the seashore of a country not their own, and, for the moment, it was enough.

____________________________________________________________
True story written for the “beguiled” prompt from Writer’s Island and “story” from Sunday Scribblings.

 


Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Categories : Love, Sunday Scribblings, Swirl of Thoughts, Writer's Island

On love and persistence

12 01 2011

My 2010 ended with a wonderful reading experience, Sue Monk Kidd’s bestselling book The Secret Life of Bees. In the novel, a 14-year-old girl named Lily Owens tries to make peace with the mother who abandoned her…and whom she accidentally killed. In this lush, glowing, sensuous novel about the hearts of women and their search for a spiritual foundation, a particular line by August, one of the most memorable characters, struck me:

“That’s the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love — but to persist in love.”

And I thought, Exactly. How absolutely easy it is to come to love someone. How thrilling and how wonderful to open your heart to the adventure that is another person coming in. The delicious rush, the heady excitement, the beautiful sweetness of it all — people love the idea of love. There’s nothing quite like it.

But it’s the day-to-day realities in the “ever after” part that people seldom talk about. When you find out that the prince isn’t all that charming and the princess isn’t quite the fairest in the land. Or when you grow up and discover that your mother isn’t perfect and your father isn’t larger than life. Or when you realize that who you’ve become isn’t quite who you planned to be. In every kind of love there is a certain level of inevitable disillusionment. What happens after that?

That’s when persistence comes in. Every kind of lasting love that I’ve seen isn’t one passionate movie moment after another. It’s a commitment, a series of daily — sometimes difficult — decisions to love and to keep on loving. And to forgive. Forgiveness, possibly, is more important than anything else. I forgive you for forgetting that anniversary. I forgive you for not understanding the reason I got mad. I forgive you for what you said when we fought. I forgive you for being human.

Because really, where would we be without forgiveness?  Without the desperately needed grace that allows us to be imperfect? If love is given only to those who are easy to love for as long as they stay easy to love, we’d all be alone. The writer Anais Nin says:

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”

Persistence is the decision to keep love alive and to replenish the source. It’s the day-to-day effort to keep seeing someone as flawed as we are through the eyes of grace. Near the end of The Secret Life of Bees, this is what Lily Owens realizes about her mother when she learns to love her despite her abandonment:

“Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.”

I think, maybe, that’s how a part of growing up happens for all of us. When we start to let go of the picture-perfect fairy tale of love and start preparing ourselves for the work that it takes. And when we realize that, no matter what, it’s still worth it.

 


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : Books, Love, Swirl of Thoughts

The day after the first “I love you”

10 11 2010

Vanessa. Vanessa. Her name was pure pleasure on his tongue, impossible to say without an exultant smile. Smooth as the silk of her skin, sweet as the scent of jasmine in her hair, soft as the sensuous touch of her hand. His every prayer answered. Nessa.

He worried that he’d suddenly wake up and find that it wasn’t real. That she didn’t really smile at him with his kiss lingering on her lips, that the tenderness in her eyes was merely a trick of the light. His Vanessa. How was it even possible that those words together can be true?

(This is another response to the 100 words challenge in Velvet Verbosity. The word for the week was “pleasure”.)

 

 


Comments : 9 Comments »
Tags: , ,
Categories : 100 Words, Flash Fiction, Love, This is fiction, ok? FICTION.

A question

29 09 2010

Slowly, I inch closer and closer.

I’ve been outside too long, and I’m used to running away.

I’m getting a little tired, though, and I wonder what it’s like to feel safe.

Are you the haven that you seem to be?

Knock, knock.


Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: , , , ,
Categories : For you, Future Mr. Right, Love, Swirl of Thoughts

The Long Way Home

23 09 2010

She felt unbearably fragile.

The words hung in the air between them, and she couldn’t bear to look up and see him. Or let him see her.

They were true, she knew, the words she had spoken. And so it shouldn’t have mattered what he replied, because that truth came with a numbness, a protection of its own. She waited longingly for that numbness to come, but it didn’t. For the first time, it didn’t. She couldn’t escape what that meant.

He could hurt her. Even now, by just leaving, he could hurt her. Because she needed him. And she had rejected him with her words that were true.

“I can’t. I know you want me to be brave again, but I can’t.”

She had to make him understand. Before he gave her more than she could ever return. Before it became more unfair to him than it already was. She owed him the truth.

It must have been only a few seconds, but his silence seemed to stretch through the night. She turned her head, away from him, towards the empty street and the sidewalk she would have to walk alone later. The city lights glowed on the pavement. She felt cold.

Then his hands were on her face, turning her back to him. Gently.

“Hey,” he said, his tone as tender as his touch. One fingertip traced the trail of moisture from the teardrop she had tried to hide from him. Slowly, hesitantly, she met his gaze.

His eyes were direct, intense. His voice was low, but clear and compelling in the cold air. “You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be. Not for me.”

The words slammed into her heart, pounded on the walls that had been necessary for so long. She couldn’t say anything past the tightness in her throat.

“Come on,” he said after a few moments. He was smiling. “I’ll walk you home.”


Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: , , , , , ,
Categories : Love, This is fiction, ok? FICTION.

A Letter for My Future Husband

4 09 2010

This is one of several letters I wrote to give to my future husband on our wedding day. I’d just like to share it as an encouragement to those who are also in the season of waiting.

June 9, 2007 (2:38 AM)

Dearest,

By the time you read this, you and I would have met, learned to love each other, and promised to belong together for the rest of our lives. I would have memorized everything about you — your face, your voice, your touch. And you would know me more intimately than anyone ever has or will.

But right now, I am alone. I know you only in my imagination…and my dreams. But, darling, in a way that I can’t explain, I love you now. It’s as if I know you in my heart, and because we are separated by time, I miss you. So I am writing this to you as a way of reaching into the future — to tell you that I am saving my heart until you finally come to claim it. I am waiting for you, beloved. And I pray that wherever you are right now, you are waiting for me as well.

As the days go by, I long for you in a way that I have never experienced before. It is a strange feeling, to miss someone whom I do not even know. My prayer is that this longing will glorify God by drawing me closer to him, because as much as I love you now and will love you in the future, I will always love Him more. I know that it will be the same for you, as it should. Our common passion for the one who made us for each other will strengthen our love and deepen our bond. It will be the first thing that will draw me towards you.

Though it isn’t always easy, I can see the hand of God in giving us this season of waiting. Because you are always in my thoughts, simple activities become special when I think of them as preparation for the future. There is so much more to learn before I am ready. Be patient with me, beloved, for my life is a work in progress. I know that yours is, too. Therefore, allow me to say this now: If there is anything, anything at all in your past that might hurt me, know that you will have my forgiveness. You do not have to earn it; it is yours. I am no stranger to second chances, and I do not want our future to hold any bitterness or recriminations. Let us live in the freedom that the greatest Love of all has restored to us.

Someday, you and I will talk about everything that made us who we are. There may be laughter, tears, thankfulness, and yes, regrets. But always, God’s goodness will be present. It is, after all, because of His love that we will find each other. And when we do, this season of waiting will give way to a season of discovery, when I can finally listen to your stories and tell you all of mine. So until that day, beloved, I am saving myself for you. I have surrendered the keys of my heart to God, and he will open the door for you to enter in the perfect time.

I love you, my darling. I am waiting.

Yours forever,

Abigail



Comments : 28 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , ,
Categories : For you, Future Mr. Right, Love, Open Letters, Singleness

« Previous Entries


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.