There are no words this morning. It’s cold, grey, and wet… just like the day we went to the courthouse in the first place. We were both wearing sweats, because we didn’t feel the need to dress up. It was, after all, just a document. We’d been best friends for three and a half years, with everyone else thinking we were having an affair and trying to hide it… but no.
In those three years and change, I simply desperately needed a friend. My heart had been put through a blender, and Dana was married. Not only that, part of those three years, we were separated by 1800 miles, Dana in Portland and me in Houston, with Dana narrating M*A*S*H* reruns to me over the telephone. When I moved back, things happened quickly, because time apart had made both of us realize that our friends were right, we belonged together… or maybe it was just me that needed convincing, because six weeks after Dana met me, she told me that she’d told her wife that she had a crush on me. I didn’t know what to do with that information, but it comes in handy now comforting me over the Argo situation, that I am not the only one who has ever been emotionally attracted to someone outside of a relationship and I won’t ever be, because it happens to the best of us.
Initially, I wanted to write the story of what happened that day, but the truth is, I don’t remember it. I wasn’t blogging then, so I didn’t write it down. It is lost except for this picture that speaks a thousand words simultaneously in light of what has happened since then. None of our friends came with us; this picture was taken by a reporter and appeared in The Portland Tribune as part of the story on Multnomah County giving out domestic partnership licenses. It appeared as my Facebook memory in the “Eight Years Ago Today” section. Our eighth anniversary would have been last Feb. 4th, but I must have posted the picture a lot later. Seeing these memories scroll by is a good thing, I think, but I also feel it is a bit like getting blanched early in the morning. But let us not forget that blanching stops the cooking process. Little by little, the fire in me dissipates as I hit the ice water.
My friend Wendy’s words hit me like a brick.
You don’t have to love it. You just have to live it.
Stories That Are All True 