It's been years now...long enough for me not to remember when I actually moved here, but short enough that I should. I'm just not sure if I can still count the years on one hand, or if I need to enlist a digit from my other.
I don't remember the pictures of just before I came here. I remember the feelings. At 41 (or was it 42), I had fallen in love for the first time and as of yet the only time. I never believed the wishy-washy sing-songy tales of love in books, or movies or as described in first person by friends of acquaintances. As far as I was concerned, love was just an urban legend... like God.
An entire year, maybe a little more, had slipped in and out of my consciousness before I closed the heavy sliding door on that moving van. And
two more before that until I was able to even call Her into my realm of possibility.Love doesn't happen quickly. It walks on every
breath, every mistake, every dream and every thought you have from the
moment you are born until the moment it finds you, unguarded.
Even as I laughed at her request to shove a paving stone she had taken a liking to into the only remaining space in the U-Haul, I didn't really believe. I didn't necessarily DIS-believe by that point either, after all, I had asked her to marry me several months before. It just didn't punch me in the stomach until a little while later, that belief that I had un-mythed the myth and that love did exist.
Before the 1,092 mile drive through Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and southern Idaho, before we finally pulled the U-Haul in front of her Cory Barton home, we courted. We courted in an unconventional, technology ridden, airport hopping, dinner over the phone with a candle in each state kind of way; but we courted none-the-less. It was almost worthy of a Harlequin novel but with the steamy heat more tailored to a behind-counter-magazine. It was being bit by a love-bug on steroids.
There were endless hours of hellos and talk-about-nothing entwined with 'I want you now' and 'only 9 more days' floating on radio frequency signals that bounced between cell-phone towers and days worth of email messages that traveled in tiny data packets across the internet that were too small to hold what we had to say. As the 'only 9 more days' turned into 8, then 7, then 6 and 5...4...3...2...and finally "one more sleep" our chests collapsed until the plane finally landed and still, until we caught sight of each other amongst weaving travelers and spinning baggage carousels before we could gasp for air.
Time together seemed like Mercury seconds compared to the Pluto hours apart and we quickly learned that love making and story telling took priority over trips to Albertsons for food let alone to the Maverick for gas to get to Albertsons. We would have eaten bread crumbs and toothpaste if we had to in the short half-times when our minds finally stop hmmm-ing from what our bodies did for hours, but we didn't have to; the hmmming never stopped. But it most have stopped intermittently, because sidewalks got shoveled, I built a deck, and She created artwork and brought home tests from school that had been graded, a marriage proposal was given and accepted, and children had stolen my heart. None of that could have been accomplished while hmmmm-ing was going on.
The courtship lasted for so much longer than we wanted it to, or could stand it to. This made clear by her ever more common 'You're not coming are you?' sighs over the phone and 'If you loved me you would come now!' texts. Plans were made, a For Sale sign put in my front yard and a well paying job given two-weeks notice. No more planetary time zone jet lag. I was going home with her and staying there. Right after I unloaded and returned the U-Haul.
