Write Love

What do you do when you’re madly in love with someone who doesn’t exist in this current plane of existence where you reside? You write.

Welcome to an unconventional love story wrapped in exuberant laughter and sprinkled with dog hair. It is a love story I would give my entire body to have back, yet it still exists in memories, photos, and iPhone movies. I begin writing about this love as I sit here and have the voices of the Great British Bake Off gleefully playing in the background. It’s the night we have to change the clocks back as it’s daylight savings time again, and the darkness will fall upon our Tennessee home just as I get off work for the day. This year, I’m fearing that darkness for the first time. It’s a reminder that the light in my love life is nothing but a treasure box full of ashes. The sum of a life left behind. Or the vessel that carried that life. Even in that small collection of organic ash that once was a 6-foot tall charmingly handsome and way too gregarious Black man, there are particles of a physical being that I would pray to hear snore through the night again.

But I won’t.

Only if I play the recording.

I made it during the middle of the night when his loud breath in matched his noticeable breath out. Laying by his side, unable to sleep and unable to allow his snore to be an organic wave whose rhythm could be akin to a heartbeat or the ocean. Only if I could get around the fact that it’s someone we love keeping us awake. On the other side of this problem, none of that noise in the night mattered at all. He was breathing. He was by my side. I would feel his body heat and could see his chest rise and fall.

Now there’s a side of a bed that is empty most nights unless I manage to get Beatrix or Sigmund moved over to that side of the bed, rather than their nightly placement of up my ass in this queen size bed. I’m annoyed yet thankful every night that they cleave to me. As the cold season takes hold, you miss your hot-natured best friend and lover whose smile and laughter could warm even the coldest heart. Erik (or, as I called him, Merik for my Erik) was my person. The one who found me on a self-destructive but stubborn path and met me with a tenacity and open mind that I never would have anticipated being housed in the skull of a conservative Republican. These furbabies, including the two little ones (Nerman and Ella), are the only offspring we adopted into this life together, and now they are the daily reminders of the love that I love.

Tomorrow, I’ll see if I can convince myself to go swimming. Then I’ll go to brunch with a new friend who’s like a little sister to me, I’ll work on clearing out the guest room for a new inhabitant, deciding to rent out the room to lessen the burden fiscally on me in our home. Then some business and friendship, possibly in the evening. While my life is beautiful, and I’m beyond blessed to have such good friends and relationships right now, you can’t quiet the yearning for love that still is but is not tangible. It’s like the night that will come earlier and remind us to sleep more or hibernate as the bears in the Great Smoky Mountains do. He loved those mountains.

He loves those mountains.
I love him.

And this storyline has just begun…to be put to pixels.