foxydaisy

So, my college sweetheart is getting married in a year. A friend pointed out that pretty much was the window for me to talk to her and get the closure I needed, and I begrudgingly agreed with him. ("GAH! I hate it when you're right!") Not to mention the fact that I'm wading into a shiny, new relationship and I actually want to give my girlfriend the best shot I can at starting a healthy relationship.

I emailed her this long letter, telling her all about my feelings for her, all the ways she hurt me, all the fears I couldn't overcome at the time, and how I wished things could have been for us. I was in love with her, but I never told her. So I finally did. After all was said and done, I ended it by saying that I wasn't upset with her, but that after years of feeling shitty for never talking about how I felt, I needed to talk to her about everything once and for all if I was ever going to feel better about us. I told her that all I expected of her was that she read the letter, she didn't need to contact me about it if she didn't want to.

A little while after I sent it to her, she sent me a chat message on gmail and just said, "I love you, too."

We talked for a long time, and she apologized for the hurtful things she did, and I did for mine. She told me that she wished I had talked to her about my feelings more when we were together, because she felt the same way about a lot of things and things could have been different for us. She told me that she cried for days when I left.

I wrapped up by telling her that I wished her the best and that I hoped her and her fiance were very happy together. The best part was, I really meant it.

I had a death in the family recently. My uncle. Ever since I was little, my aunt had dated this one guy. He would always be over at her house and come with her to family events. Then when I was in elementary school, I just sort of stopped seeing him around. I didn't understand boyfriends and breakups and stuff like that at the time.

But she never dated anyone else. For maybe 10 years. No other boyfriends. I really want to avoid the term "old maid," but she was always my single, unmarried aunt who never had any kids and didn't date.

Then when I was in late high school, she was looking for a new apartment, and he had just finished building a little cabin on his property. He offered to rent it to her, and they eventually started dating again. Not long after that, he was diagnosed with leukemia. It hit hard and fast, and she was by his side the whole time. Pretty much every time he got any test results back, the doctors would give him around three months to live. But he hung in there.

A few weeks ago, they finally got married in a small ceremony at his house. He was too weak to stand, so he had to be wed in a wheelchair. The priest even cried during the ceremony. That was two weeks before my birthday. On my birthday (the 14th), he slipped into a coma and passed away.

My aunt is devastated, but at the same time, she told me that she's so happy that she got to spend the time with him that she did, and some people go through life without even having that.

When I spoke to her a few days ago, she was still waiting for her marriage license to come in the mail.

Saturday was supposed to be the service for my uncle, and I was really blue all day. I was up in New Bedford visiting Poochie for the weekend. I had wanted to be in Hawaii attending the service, but I was a few hundred bucks short of a ticket. I really, really wanted to be there for my aunt, because we've always been very close. Plus, I mean, he may have only been my uncle for two weeks, but he's been a part of my family my entire life.

Anyways, Poochie and I were driving around with her roommate at about noon, and we passed this little dock. On a whim, she pulled the car into the parking lot and said, "I think I have one of my cameras in my trunk, I'd like to take some photos of the water." We got out of the car, and she started digging through the trunk looking for her equipment.

I wandered toward the shore with my phone, trying to get a hold of my mom. The beach made me really homesick. I don't really care for the beaches in Rhode Island, so I only go when my friends beg me. The last time I had been in the ocean was the last time I went home, over a year and a half ago. Seeing the water after that long knocked the wind out of me. I crawled up on the rock wall on the edge of the beach and sat there with my legs folded up, just watching the ocean and taking it in.

Poochie gave up on looking for her camera and wandered over to come find me. She crawled up and sat with me, and asked me what was wrong, and I said, "I should be home right now," and started crying. She held me with my head in her lap for a little while and stroked my hair. Then, she suddenly says, "We should go swimming. This is the warmest the water will be all year."

I sat up and said, "Will you go swimming with me?" and she laughed and pointed at people walking on the dock and said, "We'd have an audience." I told her, "I don't care, the only people I see here are me and you." She laughs again and says, "You really want to go swimming?" I said, "Say the word," and she told me, "Let's go swimming."

At that, I jumped off the rock wall into the sand below, threw off my clothes mid-run, and took a running dive headfirst into the waves. I held my breath while I swam underwater about 30 or 40 feet out. I surfaced and Poochie was still on shore, sheepishly taking her clothes off. I called out for her to join me and she waded out slowly until the water was up to her hips. (She fell off a dock when she was young and almost drowned, and gets nervous if she can't stand in water.)

I splashed around and floated on my back and soaked in the sensations of being in the water, and finally swam back in to where she was. The water was shallow enough there that I could stand on my knees. She put her hands through my hair and asked if I felt better, and I said yes and started crying again. We sat there in the water together, her standing and me on my knees, with my arms wrapped around her pelvis as I cried into her stomach. And she just held me.

Poochie and I were in bed the other night, and I told her I had been considering retiring my hood piercing. She asked me why and I told her that I just felt like it was time. I asked her how she felt about it, and she said, "It's your body, you can do whatever you want with it."

I thought about it for a second, and said that I had decided I was going to take it out and retire it. She laughs and says, "Well, don't take it out now!" We were sitting on the floor of her bedroom, facing each other with our legs wrapped around each other, and I started kissing her. As we kissed, I sneaked my hand down and slipped the jewelry off. (I had never removed it since I got it pierced. It was the ring I was pierced with.) Then, still kissing her, I took her hand and pressed it into her palm. She looked up, all surprised, when she realized what was in her hand. She asked if I was sure, and I nodded. Then she asked if she could keep the ring. She used to have her lobes stretched to a 4 gauge, but let them close up. She wanted to open one side back up and wear my ring in her ear.

I laughed and said, "Are we in high school? Are you going to wear my ring?"

And she did.

I worked on my e.e. cummings wall for a little bit yesterday. It's coming along. I showed Poochie a couple of his poems and she really enjoyed them. I told her that he was my favorite poet, and she started telling me about her favorite poet, Richard Brautigan. I told her that I didn't think I had heard of him, and she started quoting one of her favorites of his, called Love Poem.

She said, "It's so nice/ to wake up in the morning/ all alone/ and not have to tell somebody/ you love them..."

And I interrupted her with, "...when you don't love them/ any more."

She was thrilled and said, "You DO know him!" I said no, that I had come across that poem some time ago and fell in love with it, but had no idea who wrote it. It was one of my favorites. I even showed her that I had it saved as one of my away messages on my computer. She told me that she had stolen one of his books of poetry from the library when she was like 13 and had fallen in love with him, but that none of her friends had ever heard of any of his work. So we sat on my bed and read his poetry online for awhile together.

I totally did it in a graveyard. On top of a crematorium. Yep.