300 for 30: Day 6

I generally try to keep the men and women I date - or pine for hopelessly - out of my work, for similar reasons that it's a bad idea to get a tattoo of their name. They betray, they dwindle, they turn out different than you thought, they fall in love with someone else and let them break their precious heart that you would have cherished and nurtured (or at least you think so, when in reality you are just as prone to shattering others as anyone else is).

I do write them little poems and essays sometimes, just for them, but I don't consider that "work". It's tentative wooing. There was one young lady with porcelain skin, except for the slightest dash of brown freckles, springy hair, a profile like a Victorian cameo, the greenest of eyes, and a scatter-brained joie de vivre that I found enchanting. I never got the courage to tell her how I felt, I've always been so shy with the women, but I taped a yellow rose to her dorm room door with a note saying I wanted her to know she was admired by someone who wished her well. The only woman I've been in a relationship with was trans, which mattered to me not a mite, though she was so uncomfortable with her own body that I couldn't press her to show it to me. I would have loved every bit of it, pre-op awkwardness and all. It took me a long time to get over her. I still wish her well.

But oh, my significant other at the moment (male), my love, my dear, he's like the quiet, warm sunrise after a series of brilliant - but ephemeral - shooting stars. He's the first person I've dated steadily that I didn't see some kind of doom impending with, something that would inevitably separate us. He's the first person I have equal give and take with, who can provide comfort and strength at my times of weakness but who needs them from me at other times as well. He smells like home and hearth. I can imagine him intentionally hurting me the way I can imagine him repeatedly, purposefully hitting himself with a hammer - it's physically possible, but why on earth would he ever? He makes me laugh and he loves to just lie beside me, us holding each other, sometimes so comfortable that we drift off to sleep in that clutch, the lights still on.

I hope hope hope nothing bad happens to him, to us, that we keep on going like this. We're separated at the moment because I'm visiting my parents, but we both know we're going to run to each other with glad cries.