Marn was right.
Last time I found myself misplaced in France, way down in Lyon, alone with my laptop and a head full of roiling viscuous things, she graciously swallowed my first post-adolescent attemps at poetry, clumsy and constipated and unwittingly obsessed with iambic pentameter and a rhyme I hardly understood, she called me a romantic.
Now, trudging up my stairs, straight-backed so many years later, with sore glutes and spice-filled belly, some strange thing pulled me to check my mailbox on a Sunday and there it was, text side out, my address staring me in the face, scrawled in an achingly familiar hand.
Oh he is a romantic of the best kind, unexpected bursts of sheer wonder...
...and somehow I am privvy to this wonder.
First, an e-mail, the smallest thing but enough to catch my heart in my throat in the evening, and then a postcard (stolen from my table, it was the one I'd planned to send to you all along...), of the most romantic scenes in Paree, that we purchased together as I sighed over the sheer whimsy of the streets not two blocks march uphill from mon appartement (where I dragged him and kissed him later), filled with the most poignant words, such as an aspiring young poet that I was, could never stumble my desperately seeking fingers upon.
And all of a sudden, the kung fu flick last night, the beers and the three men d'affil� and their marriage proposals, and the man torturously rolling down his car window to whistle piercingly at us in the street as Alex looked on...
Gone. The rained-out randonn�, money worries and half-formed plans to run home after the ski season, home hopefully already carefully arranged in the province � cot�...
My brain is a jumble of us coming together, first lips until my knees are week, then the sheer radiating warmth of bodies, arms that I have memorized since the morning I first woke up to admit loving them.
No, David, it is I who should be standing in amazement, remembering the painful realization so many years ago as Marn called me a romantic, and I sat at a laptop not dissimilar from this one, swallowed hard, and swore to myself to never let the little girl out, knowing she would be crushed.
Believing no one would ever call her beautiful.
And here you are, so full of words and songs and that perfect angle with your hands on a too-generous waist...
And I am looking on my life as a romantic.
Unafraid, Valkyrie spear and shamanic bag of medicines in hand.
Unafraid, curls gathered up on my head as I know you love them, sweat-stained scarf draping one naked shoulder.
And not so far away at all, sometimes.