“Love is a power of destiny, whose force reaches from heaven to hell.”
Carl Jung
We shared our first kiss at the top of a gravel road beneath the waxing moon, just a silver sliver cradling Venus in the blue-black sky. Just days before he had texted, “I’ve heard there are some sort of rules about how long you should wait to reach out to a woman after getting her number. I don’t know how you feel about all that. Fact is, I’d sure like to see you again soon.”
If you scrolled to the top of our now years-long text thread, you would find the first line of my reply goes something like this: “I fucking hate all of those rules.”
If the fact that I lead with the F-word in my first text correspondence with a would-be love interest comes as a surprise, perhaps now is as good a time as any to confess: I swear like a sailor. In my dresser is a heather gray t-shirt folded in the styling of Marie Kondo that was given to me by a dear and fast friend nearly twenty years ago. It reads: I am a lady with the vocabulary of a well-educated sailor. It’s worn so thin it practically wears like a sheer. Bury me in it when I kick the bucket.
When it comes to words, I don’t discriminate. And as far as I’m concerned, there are few that rival the dynamism—or the empirically validated endorphin release—of a perfectly timed F-bomb. I find that it is very often the case that no other word will do.
While I wasn’t afraid to deliver an unfiltered reply, it took twenty minutes of convincing on a three-way FaceTime call with my Two Most Wanted to say yes to his invitation to accompany him to an Oktoberfest gathering at his kilt-wearing boss’s house. It seems I wasn’t quite ready to surrender my self-imposed spinsterhood. I refused his offer to pick me up and two days later I showed up on his front porch with a six-pack of Coop’s Oktoberfest lager clutched in sweaty palms.
This was my first real first date in fifteen years. During the twenty minute drive to his house—which, mind you, was just one neighborhood over from the home I shared with my ex-husband—I had the AC on blast and car napkins stuffed into my armpits which would not stop sweating despite the fact that I used the deodorant with aluminum in it. My hands had a death grip on the steering wheel even Lizzo couldn’t loosen, and I kept asking myself repeatedly, “What in the hell am I doing?”
His living room was impossibly uncluttered and I told him so. Cheekily, I asked, “Who actually lives like this?!” His reply was a quiet smile.
He had worn-leather furniture, a coffee table that looked like a castle door, and a scattering of accessories in black and blue. Hanging above the leather sofa was a large canvas photograph of him and his son walking hand in hand at the edge of a lake. On the adjacent wall was a framed print of Ragnar Lothbrok from the Vikings series overlaid with the words: “Don’t waste your time looking back. You aren’t going that way.”
I never sat down. And as I wandered, quietly studying the room, studying him, I surmised the answer to my impertinent question: a man who has just lost everything.
He was stoic and wholly unrushed despite the fact that I arrived late and we had somewhere to be. His halcyon grin only served to heighten the storm I held inside of me. The relentless churning around the same burning question that won’t let go of me: Do I dare?
We made our way well after dew point. He carried the sweat-beaded six-pack down the driveway and held open the passenger door of his truck for me. I stepped onto the running boards, gripped the grab handle and climbed inside. Then and for the remainder of the night, once asphalt gave way to country roads, I silently observed how he only ever took his eyes off of me to drive.
Day turned to night and as I sat atop a splintered picnic table with the warm October wind making a mess of my waist-long hair, I felt him study every inch of me as I told stories and laughed with strangers who felt like family. His was the kind of relentless gaze that I, until that moment, never realized I craved. And at the same time, made me certifiably crazy.
The night was young, and so were we when we climbed into a golf cart and took to the road again, kicking up clouds of dust as we traced the dirt road like the red rim of a prairie grass bowl beneath the black-topped sky. We parked at the top of the holler and held hands as we crushed gravel beneath our boots to take in a country view of the Oklahoma City skyline, all lit up at night, twenty miles away as the crow flies.
He stepped aside to snap a blurry photo of me, said he wanted to remember this moment always before he pulled me close and asked, “Can I kiss you?” Through a quarter smile, I delivered a breathless “yes.”
With one finger to my chin, he pulled my wavering eyes up to meet his, which held an impossibly tender light. Those damned candy eyes which, despite my evasion, had not once let me out of sight.
He held my face in his grease-stained hands and leaned in for the first fireworks kiss since my fateful crossing over into the second half of this wild ride called life.
My whole body softened like blacktop in July.
But somewhere on the inside, another voice hollered, Now would be a good time to run.
—
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair…
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
T.S. Eliot
Soo good!💜