It’s funny, looking back, how close we came to never finding one another. Our meeting was only possible due to an improbable series of events. A chain of questionable decisions we both made.
If any of them had panned out differently, we would have never met.
But we did.
I wasn’t sure about you at first. Sure, I thought you were good-looking. Really good-looking. My type. But I wasn’t interested. You kept saying the things I was thinking whenever we were in a group of people.
So you seemed predictable. Familiar in a way that made me dismiss you.
It was only months later that I realized how valuable this was. And that no one had felt quite as familiar before. That I was a freaking weirdo and that you matched me one for one over and over not because you were common but because you were rare.
The delay was fine. You were suspicious of me at first. Couldn’t figure out if I were the good kind of crazy or the bad. Prudently, you kept this quandary to yourself until much later, after you’d figured it out and we were together.
And once I stopped looking past you and fixed my eyes squarely on you, seriously considered being with you, went out on a few dates with you, the fact that we belonged together became the most obvious, undeniable fact.
The no-brainer of the century. The thing I could never un-see.
A game-changing realization that in some ways saved my life — and in other ways ruined it. Because everything looked different after you. My standards were raised. Everything had to be changed. For the better, to be sure, but changed nonetheless. I’d spent decades scraping by in what were essentially ruined buildings. Crumbling shelter that threatened to crash down on me.
Next to your stability, your safety, your concern, it became clear: Nothing was up to code.
Anyway, what I really want to say is — thank you for ruining my life.
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Like my essays? You’ll love my books. I’ve authored many of them, including 3 nonfiction books on polyamory and the Psychic State series, murder mysteries with strong female leads that feature a large ensemble cast of polyamorous characters.