So, umm, yeah, what happens now? How do I learn to lean into this, this new relationship in my life? How do I learn to trust, to quiet down, to not wonder almost every minute if I’m going to screw this up? How do I find that elusive ease that characterized the time I spent with him before I realized how much I liked him? With all the damage done to me, how do I not question him? How do I stay secure when he’s distant or tired? Rather, how do I stay secure in a healthy way, rather than asserting (in my mind) that I don’t need him, that he could walk away tomorrow and I’d be fine? I seem to have two states of being in relationships: 1) everything is great and wonderful and unbelievable and 2) I don’t f*cking need you. I seem to be lacking the nuance that I’m sure is in between.

Most of the time I’m fine, most of the time I spend with him is truly wonderful. But every now and then it’s as if someone knocked my legs out from under me, like a powerful blast of worry, like, how could I POSSIBLY think this is going to work.

This is all so new to me. And these growing pains of learning to trust threaten to topple the balance.

These last two weeks have been filled with such beautiful blessings and such massive setbacks that every time I sit down to write about what is going on, I stand up and run away. My agency is either shutting down, OR getting seriously funded for the first time in three years; I have to leave my cottage, BUT I might have found a truly extraordinary new living situation; I’ve seriously committed to a wonderful man, AND I’ve seriously committed to a wonderful man. Wait, that last one isn’t an “or” or a “but”. Hmm.

So while everything else in my life is as topsy-turvy, as unpredictable and challenging and difficult as possible while having possible silver linings, there is one slice of my life that for the first time in many, many, many years, is extraordinary.

Meet Dan.

This photo was taken at the Buena Vista in San Francisco, where we were enjoying Irish coffees at 2 PM on a Friday. He doesn’t yet know about this blog, or if he does, he hasn’t yet confessed. it’s been a long, slow process, the path to trust with him, and it’s kind of like the first time I ate scallops a year ago: I’ve been refusing THIS all my life? What was I THINKING?

Sweet Dan is a nurse, who works evening shifts, but who will still show up here at 12:30 AM, still in his scrubs. And so, I spend a delicious night to myself, quiet and peaceful after my extremely draining and difficult week, but I do so with the loveliest still sense of expectation, knowing that soon he’ll be here.

I’ve long said that if I ever started seriously dating someone, I’d yell it from the rafters, I’d celebrate the hell out of it. And it’s true. It is such a joyful thing, and something I actually tried pretty hard to avoid and sabotage and his patience and intuitiveness and kindness and goodness saw it through. No matter what happens with this, I’m doing it right, we are doing it right, for the first time in my life, and I am thankful for the feeling of being awake in my own life. I’m curiously unfamiliar with being loved. It is a foreign feeling to wake up in the middle of the night and the person next to me is smiling in his sleep. It’s a strange thing to be out in the world with someone at my side who is becoming a partner. It’s odd to be so much myself around someone, so utterly dorky without realizing it, and looking up to see him clutching himself because he’s laughing so hard at my dorkiness. Someone who so easily says, even though we haven’t yet reached the point of professing future huge feelings, “that’s what I love about you”. (Usually in reference to my extreme ridiculousness.)

So, from the rafters, I holler: I’VE FOUND IT, IT’S WONDERFUL, AND I WANT IT TO BE LIKE THIS FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. With him, or no, no matter: this is HOW I want to do it for the rest of my life.

Never in my life have I wept over a home. We moved what seemed like a hundred times, although it was more like twenty, but I never wept over a house, and I rarely even wept over a friend.

But tonight, I weep. I weep like a little girl whose dad never came to pick her up, not for twenty years. I’m an utter fucking mess because the little cottage I’ve called home for almost two years must be vacated in thirty days. The details don’t matter; what matters is that my little home, these tiny five rooms, my tomato garden, my swing, my tiny slice of peace in this world is being ripped from me and I feel like I’m losing my best friend. Or that I’m in the middle of a long, rolling earthquake during which everything that is stable is going to shudder and fall apart.

I’m reacting so strongly for a number of reasons- this may be have been one of the most difficult days of my entire professional career- but also, it’s just awful, this feeling that I’ll have to leave the first place that EVER felt like home. And it certainly doesn’t help that I’m on my third glass of wine and I’m reasonably sure that the bottle is destined for recycling within the hour. I’m at an utter loss. I don’t want to leave my home. I don’t want to leave my writing nook, my swing in the sunshine, the earth I tended so carefully to make it bear such beautiful fruit last summer, the porch where Fezzik has made his napping home, hell, I don’t even want to leave all the spiders and the absolute lack of storage space. I don’t want to leave my home, but I have to, within 30 days.

I guess I should be thankful for the almost two years that I got to pay next to nothing for a beautiful little place that helped nurse me back to health. And I’m the one that keeps insisting that every firmly closed door leads to one swinging wide open. But this sucks ass.