Five years ago, W. was president again, PJP II had passed, the first face transplant went down in France, and I was single. I wasn’t struggling with it in any conventional sense, and I wasn’t miserably lonely – quite the opposite. Life had taken on a comfortable rhythm post divorce- running 5 nights a week, Law & Order marathons, “Welcome to Moe’s!”, a goal set and met of a 5k a month, peppered with kind friends and mini adventures. Maybe not your cup of tea, but it was mine, and it. Was. Delicious.

While my debt (*cough* thanks ex husband *cough*) had me working a second job a couple of nights a week, I had few complaints. My affordable 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath apartment was in a bustling and alive part of town, and it was painfully charming with its squeaky hardwoods, eat in kitchen and spacious back deck — ideal for writing under a canopy of leaves, among screaming squirrels and birds.

My rub with relationships then wasn’t a source of panic or frustration or desperation – it was one of annoyance and whybotheritis. I’d met and spent time with smart and wonderful men, they just didn’t fit me and I didn’t fit them.

Cut to: my seester.

My seester with a brain as giant as her overly generous heart, with her masters in forensic psychology and her multiple life-coach certificates. My sister, who always has time for one of my rambling ranty calls from across the continent.

As we spoke one afternoon, I imagined her in her LA garden surrounded by bougainvillea and under the orange tree near the guest cottage/her office.

“Go to your happy place.” she said, and I nearly choke-laugh which really isn’t that funny since I’m pretty sure I was driving at the time. “Do you have one? Maybe a park? Maybe a diner? Go there. Go there and bring paper with you and a pen – this can’t be done on a computer, there’s something primal and healing about the depression a pen makes in paper.”

I’m skeptical but intrigued and then skeptical some more, because I feel like there’s a hidden camera in the mix somewhere and I’m about to make a complete fool of myself.

“Make a list.” she tells me. I may have scrunched my nose or rolled my eyes or both.

“Make a list of what the perfect mate looks like – and I don’t mean physical attributes though a few of those are fine, too. I mean what kind of person are they?”

I’m at a loss, and I flashback to a seminar class I had in high school where there were no right or wrong answers but I still felt like every one I could conjure up was not only complete stinky BS, but also horribly wrong.

As if feeling the trepidation rattle in me via our shared DNA, she throws one out one of hers to get me started: “He walks up behind me at the kitchen sink on a Saturday morning when I have rat-nest hair and yuck mouth and tells me I’m beautiful and I believe him.”

“Oh shit,” I remember thinking, “that’s good. I’m using that.” She throws a few more at me and we hang up with the “I love you’s” we’ve been saying for thirty years.

Two days later on my lunch break I head to a park near my office with a blanket, my pen and one of my trusty yellow tablets. I’m still looking around for a suspicious van loaded with zoom lenses ready to capture my idiocy, and embark on the task reluctantly. The next thing I know there are 5 pages of requirements: heartfelt and goofy, they’re representative of things I’d had and never wanted again, things I had and wanted again, things I’d never had.

A few weeks passed and I’d already forgotten the list, the exercise, the trauma of waiting to show up on AFV or a list of Darwin Award nominees when I met The Mc at a social event. I watched from a distance…kind. Confident without being cocky. Laughed openly and freely. Handsome.

There were several weeks of awkwardness that followed before I gave him the nudge he needed to ask me out, and when he did I had circled back around to the list – I was armed and ready with my modern day Santa/cookie demands.

Some might say “the rest is history”, but I usually try not to be that big of an ass hat.

The 4 ½ years since haven’t been all ice cream and cool ocean breezes with sizzling sunsets, and the fact is I have no guarantee the he won’t grow weary of my shenanigans a month from now and kick me to the curb (though I don’t think he will). What I do know is it’s pretty great, and that having the list was no coincidence.

If you’re having a hard time wrapping your brain around it, humor me a bit longer and let me hit you with an analogy. When you need a new pair of jeans, where do you go? Knowing that we each have our own answer, I ask you next, where would you go if you’d never had a pair of jeans. If you’d never SEEN jeans? If you’d never even HEARD of jeans? You might end up at U-Haul rental or a florist or a recycling center. Right? Because you don’t even know what you’re LOOKING FOR.

Same deal.

So just now, I’m writing all this out for you on a yellow tablet in another of my happy places, with a sliver of Sunday morning sun sneaking through the cracks of two tall buildings. The sun is finding its way to my pale, rickety legs while I sip coffee and worry about you.

I’m writing this in case you’re lonely and trying to make something or someone fit that doesn’t. I’m writing it for you in case you’re lost and frustrated.

I’m writing it for us – that we might appreciate what we have or have not, as a reminder that if we focus, if we breathe, if we have patience – we will find what we’re looking for…if we know what we’re looking for.

It’s a picturesque fall day – though around me people are complaining that fall was skipped entirely and we’re in the throes of winter.

Me? I’m okay with it. Sitting outside at a coffee shop – one I used to frequent far more than I do now – with a sweater under fleece, a hot cocoa and my trusty yellow tablet (oh, how I’ve missed you). On the sheet prior to the one I’m writing on now, I’m making a list of goals for myself in 2010.

The wind is gusty, sporadic. It holds a definite nip but it’s just teasing the leaves of my tablet. Flipping up the corners of the pages I have yet to fill with scrawl and navel gazing, I’m smiling back like the village idiot at the invisible when it greets me and flushes my cheeks.

The jolts bring me into the present: to feel my skin and pay attention to the nourishment filling my lungs. To revel in the silence broken by passing cars and footsteps of people hustling in and out of the shop as if they’re outrunning a blizzard. It reminds me at 9 knots that too much time has been spent worrying about where I should be and with who and doing what, and that it leaves me empty, even when I fulfill my obligations. Even when I have fun. Noodle that, Freud.

There’s an itch on the back of my brain, it has a face and a name and a little gray body with Gumby arms and it’s clearing its throat repeatedly to get my attention and pointing at a picture of The Mc and I not spending enough time together. Correction: enough quality time. In the picture, we’ve hit our routine stride as we encroach on the 4 year mark (my God! Has it been so long already?). We come home – exhausted – share a meal and collapse. Or, many evenings, I’m out and come home to him already in his second round of dreams. Thank you, Little Mr. Itch. I needed help seeing what was right in front of me.

I imagine that most of the coupled-up, once giddy and swooning population reaches the same space, but I don’t imagine they move through it. I imagine they stay there, forever. I see it in the way their bodies don’t touch in restaurants and in the sparkle missing from their eyes in the grocery store aisle when they hand off the box of pasta to be dropped in the cart beside the Rogaine and tampons.

I don’t want that. Never have. I want romance and love and I want it to ooze out of us like an abscess partnered with a fever you’re not sure if you should be scared of or not.

Luckily, I found a man who doesn’t want it either. Of course we’re moving forward and building our future (honoring our inner adults), but we’re also recommitting ourselves to dating and affection and affirmation and being silly and playful and not taking one another for granted and embracing the good and the bad we both carry with us. There will be tudes copped and eyes rolled and groans at bad jokes but in the end there will be this: mutual respect and adoration.

Contrasting history with reality, contrasting the days I spent at that coffee shop 5 years ago, the nights and weekend afternoons of writing my way through my own rebirth after thinking I’d failed at life against the balance (but with an acknowledgment if a permanently restless soul) I’ve been given today…well, it’s really something to behold.

You actually can start over. If you want it, if you try, if you fight for it and if you stop long enough – once in a while – to visit the old coffee shop, get slapped around by a premature winter wind and listen to Little Mr. Itch.

I gave the PFL / man slave / partner / mine / love monkey / ICE a ring.

It’s titanium with Manzanita burl inlay, made by hand in TN and brought to us via etsy.com, a site I’ve loved for as long as I’ve known about it.

As night threatened to fall on our last day at the beach, The Mc and I sat on our rented patio with drinks in hand watching the beach goers making their ways home with rosy skin and sand in places no one wants to think about. We made small talk about the books we’d read or were reading during the last few days and I summarized a few chapters from The Last Lecture that resonated with me, ones I thought would hit home with him as well.

Suddenly and unintentionally the conversation became more serious.

The thing that left an imprint on my feeble little sand coma mind was not just the adoration and honesty with which Randy Pausch wrote about and for his children, but the insightfulness demonstrated as he prepared them for a world without their dad. His desire to leave them with his wisdom – a lifetime of lessons and learnings and mistakes and morals and values and a smidge of his zest. Words, emotions and travails he wouldn’t have the opportunity to convey first hand.

The Mc lost his dad when he was 12 and I (as you probably know) when I was 23. I thought about what we, as a couple that won’t become parents, will pass along – and to whom.

What is my legacy, what is our legacy? Who do we pass life lessons of our own on to, let alone the lessons our parents provided us? Will that wisdom die with a generation? Does it matter? Is it like someone telling a toddler not to touch the stove, knowing full well they have to experience the heat for themselves to realize the lesson behind the words? Or is it possible there’s a nugget in there that needs to be churned up and washed off to show someone twenty years from now “See? It only looked like a turd. Would you have known that ruby was in all that muck?” Who do we leave the proverbial turd for, and what does it look like? My blog? A novel we have yet to write? Weekends with extended family and ramblings to teen children that don’t belong to us?

Anyone who has reached their thirties knows that part of growing up means going through waves of gaining and loosing friends as your values, priorities, and interests change. In as much as the bubble written with hearts over the letter “i” in the epitaphs scrawled in yearbooks are genuine and real at the time, and that the promises and professions of “BFF” and pacts to keep in touch and grow old together dissolve with the years. So, too, do adult friendships.

In my twenties there were at least two waves of friends who came and went once they married or became parents. It’s not a fault I find with people, it’s a rite of passage. I accept, I move on, because parenting isn’t for me, I chose another path. Now that The Mc and I are in our mid and late thirties respectively, we ponder our future. Not what’s for dinner or where we’ll be in five years or even what the cabin is going to look like…but the real future. The end future.

We moved from the porch to the couch and continued to talk about how different our future looks when compared to those of [most of] our friends.

When all our hair is the color I just suffocated and we’re trying to deny the possibility of Depends being on the grocery list, they will be welcoming home college students, or grads, or adult children or even grandchildren. We will welcome visitors to our home. Siblings, nieces, nephews, friends and their children; but none of our own.

We wondered aloud if we’d made the right choice for the right reasons – knowing full well that we had – but questioning is always good and healthy. We were bouncing about the possibility of an alternate reality for the sake of our own potential future loneliness.

There were no answers that night, and there aren’t any tonight. Ours is a future we’re choosing because it fits us, and it’s just as scary to face a future where you’re bearing the responsibility of shaping another human being as if you’re facing a future without.

Still, there are more questions at the end of the conversation then there were when we started. Will we be old and alone/lonely, or alone and surrounded with friends? Will they be friends we haven’t met yet, or will the relationships we have today survive children (and my opinions of how little people should be reared)? What will happen if he goes first, or if I do? Will there be a strong enough support network to carry us through? There will be no offspring arguing about who will or won’t house us, how to pay for our medical care, or what to do with our remains…how soon can we get that paperwork in place? Who will provide the horrifying antidotes for our eulogy if there are no children waiting for an opportunity to embarrass us?

Like I said, I don’t have the answers…hell, I’m not even sure I knew I had the questions.

Nothing says sexy like coming home to this scene.

Is there any one thing your partner does that you wish maybe they didn’t? Even the teenciest bit?

PS It’s not the TP thing, it’s the making me think about him doing stuff.

“Girl, walk away. The only kind of game it’s ok to play that early in a relationship is Scrabble” I said, and she laughed so hard she snorted and we ate bag of cookies and agreed that everything does happen for a reason.

(originally posted 12.4.2004)

He’s evacuated a closet as big as my condo and moved his bits to the “man closet”. He emptied a vanity drawer as if that’s enough space for perfumes and prescription skin care items and brushes and depilatory cream and make up I never wear. He woke up at 4am yesterday with the cat (who we now lovingly refer to as “firecrotch” on account of she’s a redhead) because she was playing with a mouse I gave her and he didn’t want me to wake up prematurely. He did the same at 5am this morning when her automatic crap catcher/cleaner-upper choked on poo and gave itself an anniurism. I’m officially not allowed to eat dessert on the couch because chocolate in my hands always winds up on the floor.

So we’re settling in while some near and dear are settling out. Existential and romantic crises are the crap de jour and I just want to hand them a stack of carefully selected titles, give them a hug and send them off to a cabin in the rolling hills of South Carolina with the advice: “don’t take it all too seriously, sweets…it’s only life…” knowing full well that never helped heal me even if it did comfort me some. That’s the trouble with love – it doesn’t always translate.