I have a beautiful spring weekend on the coast planned, to be spent in a ‘spa cottage’ a block from the beach, in a community more village than town, small, intimate, friendly. Time planned for stillness, for tenderness, for meditation, yoga, and long conversations with a new love. It sounds wonderfully romantic.

Oh, to be sure, this love of mine has been part of my life for years, a timeless measure of time that feels like ‘always’. ‘New love’ hardly describes the chronology of our life together… but somehow, I have been remiss where love is concerned. Blind? To be sure; blind to her needs, her heart, even her beauty. Deaf to her words, her poetry, and that creative spark that makes her so much of who she is. I’ve been so hard on her, for so long. So often forcing to her scream what could have been whispered. I’m very fortunate that she stuck it out long enough to see me turn toward her loveliness with real affection in my eyes. I’m very sorry she had to wait so long.  

She will probably always seem about 22 to me; frozen in memory at that pinnacle of youthful beauty we each achieve, so often unnoticed until it has passed by. I have a photograph of her, then, dark-haired, fair, eyes-closed, thoughtful, mouth relaxed, she is calm and quiet; she is in a bubble bath, photographed on the sly, unaware of the subtle intrusion on her precious privacy.

22

I know so much about her, and until I realized how much love there is between us, I didn’t realize how little that knowledge meant for understanding her. Still, I know things. I know she thinks she’s fat. She struggles to ‘feel heard’ but doesn’t have words for her frustration, and too many for everything else. She rarely sheds tears, and when she succumbs to ‘crying’ it is often wordless, soundless, stuck like a scream frozen on a paused movie, that becomes garbled vocalizations of fury or terror through the force of her will. She yields to her animal nature as if forced, as though there might be something to prove, and perhaps in the proof she might find something like a soul; being too near her heat, her passion, her childish rage is hard to bear. I berate her for her impulsiveness and resent her lack of control. So often I have wanted to comfort her – or beat the hell out of her; unable to choose, I would choose instead to silence her, or leave her in pieces, alone. I did not want to believe she needed to be cared for; so often tenderness seemed the only thing that could move her to tears, at all. I know she doesn’t like to be touched by strangers, and doesn’t distinguish between sex and love; she says “love is a fraud, but sex is something I can feel’.  I know how she really feels when she says it. I know about her pain. I know she has a lifetime ahead of her, and finding her way will likely take all of it.

I know she doesn’t know how much she will survive, or how much she will change, in the years ahead of her in that photo.

Complicated, broken, she means the world to me now, and I wonder what I could do to ‘make it all up to her’ somehow. A quiet spring weekend at the coast, the luxury of being utterly heard, cared for, attended to – it’s just a down payment on a very large debt. She’s stuck it out with me, you see. It wasn’t ever certain that she would.

This weekend I’ll take the trip to the coast, for some solo time, getting to know this woman I love, hearing her stories anew, with compassion, and patience – I know she needs that from me. We’ve come a long way together, this me-of-22, and I. It’s been ugly, and more than once seemed at the edge of what could be suffered. It’s time we got together over a coffee or two, and really shared now together; there are things she never knew, that I’d like to share with her – like my love.