where to begin

Posted February 17th, 2006 by Michelle

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.