Tue, 21 Aug 2012 18:20:25 -0700Blame it on lack of sleep -- the pager had been silent through a cocktail party and dinner party chez moi this weekend, and yet Lion-O tossed and turned in illness all Sunday night, as bad as any network outage -- but my composure cracked last night and I started slowly dripping tears into my glass of Beaujolais as we stood in his kitchen cooking pasta. I've created a disparity, and as much as I've been patient and calm, on occasion an acute spike of anxiety will piggyback on some lesser worry (should I drive up to Laurel's wedding early, or work a full week? Did the doctor call yet?), and then there goes the evening. There's only so much to be said. I exhaust myself, then take out my salty contacts; he holds me close. I gulp air and remind myself to be patient. Because mostly, truly, it doesn't matter. We spent the last weekend of July at FnF, dancing and staring into each other's eyes and at the blinky lights; a week later, we flew to Bonaire in the Dutch Caribbean and spent nine days scuba diving, identifying reef fish, stalking turtles, dancing underwater, competing on Nitrox consumption. We rented trucks whose speedometers didn't work (but they were in km/h anyhow) and whose gears ground, and drove around the perimeter of the island with the windows down, hair blowing, half-dressed in wetsuits. We put Hazelnoot on pancakes, fried eggs and made coffee, slept in, devoured novels. We'd join the group after a late breakfast, already on their second dive, and cruise down to 80 or 100 feet, over double reefs, around a wreck, through brilliant coral, avoiding spiny lionfish and chasing adorable trunkfish, burning our tanks down to 500 PSI and then wading ashore -- fins in one hand; holding each other's with the other -- at sunset. We put on bug spray and found the whitewashed French bistro down the road, the Spanish tapas place right on the water, one glass of wine suddenly plenty after a day of surprising exertion underwater, watching the lights on the harbor, his arm around my shoulders. He gallantly carried my tanks for me and wore my dive computer when I didn't need it, two giant watches on his tanned wrist. Who needs words and concepts when you can spend every hour of a 9-day vacation together and still fall asleep, happily entwined, back home? My friends love him. I love him. There's just one piece left. And on good days -- most days -- I'm happy to wait. |