And you don’t want me to be your wife. I understand that. It doesn’t even take compassion. No one wants to be where they’ve already been. Or at least, no one I love. Forward motion. That’s positive. And of course your dream of love has been destroyed, of course it has. It won’t come back, and I hope you don’t look for it. Let it go. The only love you will find again is nothing like your love for her. It is made up of completely different materials. I hope it is stronger this time, I hope it is wiser. I hope it is older, and new. I hope it takes you completely by surprise. I hope it makes you laugh, and bites you on the nose. I hope you wake up in the morning and are surprised to find it on your mind, in your heart. I hope it warms you. And I hope you trust it. Really trust it. Because I don’t want to be compared to her. I don’t want you to expect of her what you expected from me.
You talk about the toothpaste caps and the cupboard doors, I know they are examples of other things. I know there are things you’re afraid to show me, I can only know because it is the same for me. I know there are things you are afraid you’ll find in me. I know you weren’t ready to be afraid. But you can’t create the future, you can only set yourself up. Fate knows what she’s doing. She will play her hand in her own good time, and there is no way to tell whether I’m a spade or a heart.
You wanted an excuse to dismiss me didn’t you? You wanted me to come up there for New Years and pick a fight with you. Tell you it was time for commitment, time for a promise. I told you I would not ask for something neither of us are ready for. I know you’re not, I know I’m not. I know we live in separate cities. It is easy for me to say that I would move to Portland if you asked me to, because I know you will not ask. And I will not ask you to move here. I will be happy if you do. But I will not ask you to do that for me. Not yet anyway. I don’t know when that time will be, I cannot even promise myself that time will ever come. I don’t know that I will ever make demands on you. You have a daughter. You answer for more than yourself.
If you lived here, you said, it would make everything worse. Look at this buffer we have. Look at this distance that makes everything so intriguing and safe. If you lived here, you said, we wouldn’t like eachother. And I answered you. How many couples would love to live in the same city? How many couples do live in the same city when they meet? Most. How many people tell me how much long distance sucks? Maybe for now it is a good thing. To keep me from jumping the gun. To keep me patient. To keep me from rushing in headlong and missing the finer points of you. (Is this supposed to keep me safer, I wonder? Is it supposed to mean that I can find your flaws sooner? Bail if I need to? To be honest… it would already be a blow. I would already be hurt if this ended. Even this early on.) This distance does keep us slow, and that, given all circumstances, I think is good. I don’t want any of this to be forced. I don’t want anything to happen between us that doesn’t happen on it’s own. In it’s own time. I don’t want either one of us to rush. Because I have a feeling. I have a feeling that if we lived closer together, and we saw eachother more often, I have the feeling we’d like it. I have the feeling we could fall in love.
And I don’t know that I’m willing to give it up yet; this me I’ve been building. I feel like I’m putting on the finishing touches to the masterpiece. Like all the music I hear, I don’t like to hear it rushed. Put out on the market too early. I’d rather wait patiently than hear something half done. I’m working on me still, I know I will always be, but alittle more time on my own.
Maybe it’s love I want to make sure I understand. I do dream of the picture perfect marriage, the white wedding, the cinderella story. Doesn’t every girl? But I already know that doesn’t work. I don’t want my love to end my life. I want it to be a beginning. I don’t want to depend on the same old things. I want to find something new every day. Like Papa and Mama Sharma: arranged marriage. What a concept, but one of the only working ones I know. I asked Mama why that was. She told me it is because she knows she will have to live with Yadu all her life. So she must find the things about him she does like. She has to find ways around those which she does not. It’s the finding that I didn’t expect. The putting up with? I know that. The quirks the habits, but I’d never thought of the finding. Look for something new everyday. There’s the thought that took me in its arms.