Today I found a quote that made me feel better about moving on from Supergrover (if that’s what she ultimately wants, I don’t know). That’s because it made me know that we won’t move on. We’ll absorb:
The two worst days in falling in love with a writer are realizing they’re writing about you………….. and realizing when they’ve stopped.
Supergrover didn’t fall in love with me as a woman, but she did with me as an author. She absorbed me like she absorbs every writer she’s ever read…. completely. I know she’ll never forget words I’ve said in anger, but she’ll also never forget how much I love her, either. That’s because I have learned through writing to you that she lives in my ink. As long as I write, a thread of her will be somewhere. There will be other women, other stories, none of them her. None of them even close. She cannot be convicted of a crime by a jury of her peers. She doesn’t have any peers, like Meryl Streep….. except comparatively Streep is a swamp witch. Nothing makes my face light up more than hers. Nothing. I doubt anything ever will. I do not say this in a sad way. it is the truth. I will never meet anyone like her ever again. Our connection means she cannot go away, so I’m not going to make her. She can sit here until she’s ready to go on her own. I’m at peace, and when she comes to me in dreams we have the conversations I would have liked to have had in person. I bring her a new book every time. New books make her smile at me. I would do anything to have her keep doing that. Even when she’s smiling at me in a photo, I feel light and warmth.
If she thinks I’m painting her as a villain, it’s not because I have any need. She is made of industrial light and magic in a film George Lucas could never dream up. I have had negative thoughts about this relationship as I’ve worked through whether our patterns work for me, things she’s unwilling to discuss. At no time has that made my love for her smaller in any way. I can choose to limit interaction to protect myself and have this space to get angry on my own….. but as the anger leaves me, you’ll see joy as well.
A lot of it has been stopping being an apologist. Trying to make my emotions look smaller so that they’d be more acceptable. For instance, I played off what hearing her voice did to me because it would not have been a proportionate response. I’m flowery and romantic with language, anyway, so she starts talking and there are bells ringing in my head… not church bells, just that her voice was musical and I wanted more. I could have listened to her talk for hours about nothing or everything, and I minimized it. I’ll never get that moment back.
I should have told her a lot of things, and i didn’t. But more than what I wish I’d said, I wish I’d heard. I wish I’d heard how my words affected her and in more than just broad strokes, because I know it wasn’t all bad or good. I have e-mails where she’s just copied and pasted what she’s liked, and I wish I had more of those. I have taken so much hell for the things she hasn’t liked, and there are a lot of them.
Alternatively, I love her anger. I never want to see it because it’s scary, but it walks the pain/pleasure line quite effectively. We rile each other up and seeing her fire is impressive. You just can’t put it out. She has to sneeze angry fire until it reduces to sparks on its own. You stand there with a blanket, because making fire takes a lot out of a dragon. You give her a shoulder to sleep on because when she gets that angry, she’s about to pass out. When she does, I’ll be still til she wakes. Never wake a sleeping dragon. This has been written many times.
I don’t need to be her husband/wife/partner because I am none of those things and also permanently etched into her mind. Affixed on her heart. She cannot forget me even if she tries very, very hard………
So I know she does indeed know how it feels to be me.
I am a writer, lost in a book.
She is a reader who doesn’t know whether she’s reading a story that’s finished, because the author isn’t sure, either. We will chase each other through time. If love is as certain an energy in the universe as novelists think, she and I will keep finding each other. Love never gets destroyed, it just changes. In our next lives, we may not even be female. But because we’re writers, we would recognize each other anywhere. There’s slim chance I wouldn’t recognize her, even in a different face. She can put on all the Halloween makeup she wants, but I’ll remove it in three punctuation marks.
Opening up to each other the way we did was just as vulnerable as rushing into an affair. We will never see each other without our clothes, but we have been naked emotionally more than once. I absolutely think that’s harder to find in a relationship.
I did indeed get my romcom with someone who absolutely knows it, whether she accepts that she’s my shite in nining armor or not. I will always be the Keeley to her Rebecca, because I didn’t settle for fine. I got hit by fucking lightning. She’s the gift you get from the universe for being an extraordinarily good person and somehow the universe still sent her to me. My heart is big enough to accept the package that comes with her. She is too big a gift to be mine alone.
On this evensong, I am reflecting upon the fact that I never want the second day to come for either one of us………
I can fall asleep easy knowing it never will. Neither of us will ever forget this time in our lives, when the story was us. It has already been written.
Stories That Are All True 