crazy on a night like tonight
I cranked the heat in the cab of my little truck speeding north from Corvallis at midnight, seven hours and counting down until my alarm would ring for Monday morning, and I tried to focus on Beowulf, the new Seamus Heaney version being read to me from my speakers, and not on my sleepiness - the particular thick sleepiness that comes from a measure of resolution, which Operaman and I have, for the moment, arrived at. I wouldn’t call it an uneasy truce exactly. Truces are for battles. And in the end it felt easy entirely.We more or less decided not to decide. But not in the wussy way we’ve decided not to decide before – the way that goes like, Oh, it’s late and I’m still attracted to you, so let’s just figure this out later. More in this way: I don’t need to know right now if we’re headed in exactly the same direction, and by right now I mean right now and by exactly I mean exactly.
Needing To Know has never been a thing I’ve struggled with, and I remember being baffled when a college boyfriend asked, exasperated, If you’re not thinking about this as long-term, then why are we doing it at all? Plenty of reasons, I thought. Today, for example, was better than it would have been otherwise. What more is there?
I’m a little older now. I’ve come to appreciate the ways you can know a person better when you stick with them, and I delight in the making of certain plans. I ticked through my twenties in one-to-three-year relationships that suited their time frame and then stopped, and I’ve gotta say my twenties were pretty awesome. But looking out at my thirties, I’m not really hoping for a three-peat. I’m ready for something new. Something not new.
And though I have yet to become someone who asks about retirement plans on a first date, I am not now inclined to launch a romance for its collector’s value, or to sustain one as filler. So after engaging in two years of On Again Off Again Operaman, I feel like I should feel some clarity. Some sense of (gag) going somewhere, or not.
Instead what I feel is that this relationship kicks my ass sometimes, leaves me alone when I’d prefer companionship, refuses to let me lean on it. But also it is full of thoughtfulness and improvisation and adventure. It asks me to show up as a whole person, and as an adult, even when that’s hard. And it’s often an obscene amount of fun.
So we’re not going to make any big decisions right now, since right now school is starting and med school interviews are being scheduled and fall has arrived with all the brisk moodiness it brings. Operaman is going to get through his semester and I am going to figure out how to heat my house, and sometime around December perhaps this will all make perfect sense.
And in the mean time I drove home, and I switched out Beowulf for an Indigo Girls album I haven’t played in seven years, and I sung it start to finish. It felt like the first week of freshman year, and like breaking up and like boarding a plane, like all the things that beat you up and bring you somewhere new. I’m so bad at endings I said to Mo on Saturday. But you’re so good at beginnings, he replied. I’m pretty fucking lucky, to have someone like that at the other end of the phone. Goodbye, September.
posted by tortaluga @ 11:11 AM
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