Crystal Ball

The things I saw and heard in my head just about 18 months ago have all come true except one.

That last foretold possibility may take years and years to see fully through. I am okay with that.

Last night there was an eclipse. It was cloudy and we couldn’t see anything, but the quality of the light changed. Later, Soulmate and I sat on his bed, wine glasses nearly empty, a DVD paused in mid-flight, and we talked about the eclipse.

I remember the last time this happened, I said. 1994. I was in Pittsburgh.

I was driving to my office and hurried when the light in the sky began to change. Everything was golden, strange. The air felt different. Expectant. When I got to the office, they were all outside. I stood transfixed by the shadows on the ground cast by the leaves of the tree above. Each leaf, a perfect crescent cutout. The light was so strange. We looked at one another like something truly real — for the first time, maybe — was happening. And then it was over. The leaf-shadows grew into wholeness again.

18 years until the next one, he said. We’re going to have an amazing time. You and me.

So we’re talking about our life together in terms of decades, now. Maybe even the death-do-us-part thing. I cannot imagine my life without this man, ever.

That last thought both entrances me and scares the shit out of me. Mostly because of this, that I wrote earlier today:

I am a woman who loves deeply but is still afraid to fully let love in, because maybe it’s just an illusion, a gossamer butterfly wing, or I dreamed it, and if I let it in what if I found out it wasn’t there?

I love the way he looks at me. The way he touches me. The way I feel when we are close, when we walk so close holding hands looking at the amazing sky, and when we are naked, him moving above me, inside me. I love the way I feel when we are apart, when I feel him thinking of me, feeling me. I love his eyes, his smell, the sound of his voice. I love this man and sometimes, sometimes, it is all so intense, like I can’t possibly hold this amazing and delicate gift he’s holding out to me, that my arms can’t possibly hold it, I can’t even though it is the gift I have yearned for my whole life. I have wanted him for so very long. And I am afraid, part of me is afraid, that if I truly let him in past all the layers of not-me-ness I wear, that he isn’t real, or that he won’t want what’s inside the layers, at the core, and that I will wake and find I dreamed him.

And that would be unbearable.