This weekend I will be turning 35 years young and I'm oddly at peace with it. My life is pretty damn great at the moment and given where I was 14 years ago at around this time, I'm just happy to still have a spot at the table in this whole life thing. But man, is it weird to think about it all having happened so long ago. I got a chance to really think about it all last night at dinner with R, who is one of my most significant exes. R and I are kindred spirits, in a way. No one will ever comprehend how much we went through together, how we've both felt nearly every emotion you can feel towards another person. I wrote recently that she loved me when I was thoroughly unlovable and I realized last night the reason for that is that she knows no other way. Neither of us know how to love conditionally or halfway so once we loved each other, that was it. Now so far removed from our shared past, she asked if I was up for a birthday dinner (her birthday was a few weeks back), and that sounded fantastic.
There was a time when I thought R and I might end up together, though I had some doubts about our future if we did. She wanted the two kids and picket fence deal and if you know me, too much domesticity has always made me nervous. I used to think I could be happy with her in that existence, but it wouldn't have truly been right for either of us. At our core, we were a lot of 'coulda been'. I'm curious to know how long we would've made it if not for an event in late 2002 that finally sent us our separate ways. We were beginning to find a rhythm after a horrendous year of depression and therapy (this was before the Dark Ages truly began, btw). I would not have lived through that year if not for R, she was my savior in so many ways it's ridiculous. But a future together was not to be. That final event was too much for us to get through, or rather we both decided we didn't have it in us to fight back from anymore negativity, and we called it quits in a very anti-climactic and drama-free way. Of course we lingered for awhile because it's difficult not to when you've shared such important times in your lives together. She had trouble with the fact that I continued to spiral after we broke up, and that I moved on almost effortlessly and R is nothing if not passionate, so it caused a huge argument that resulted in us not speaking for several years. We exchanged the odd text every now and then after things thawed a bit, and after she got married, but never had a chance to truly hash things out until last year when she invited me to dinner with her husband and their two girls. The dinner went very well and we've kept in sporadic touch ever since. Last night was the first time we've been able to sit down and reminisce just the two of us and it was great.
Sometimes when you get a chance to look back, you realize how your life would've been completely different if you hadn't known certain people. R is one of those people for me. I would not be who I am today if not for our time together. She asked during dinner if I ever could've imagined we'd be sitting here nearly two decades later, hurling dangerously close to 40 and no longer bitter about how our relationship ended. I don't recall either of us ever talking about where we'd be in twenty years while we we were together, we just kind of assumed it would all fall into place. And it has all fallen into place for both of us, albeit not the way we thought it would. I'd still walk through fire for that girl, probably even more willingly than I would've back then. I didn't comprehend what we had at the time and I really wasn't yet able to appreciate just how good of a woman she was. I don't regret where we've ended up, mind you, we're both where we were always meant to be. But she's kind of the prototype for who I would love to end up with in the end. Dinner got me thinking about how you gotta hold onto those types of people when they come along, even if you have to let them go for awhile in order to usher in a new era, so to speak. Even though we didn't talk for years and it didn't end in the best way, either of us could've called the other at any time and asked for something we needed and it would've been done without question. R was a bright light during a time when all that seemed to surround me was darkness and I'll never say a bad word about her. It's so good to see her happy.
