I have been on a 24 day long first date.  Anybody who ever followed or read any of my blogs knows that I have a propensity to fall hard and fast when it comes to matters of my heart.  I don’t know why; I mean I love my life, my house, my job…blah-blah-blah, I’ve written and said it all before…I don’t “need” anybody, but I have wanted, always it seems, to like the idea of having a somebody.   I don’t have any REASON at all to want anybody in my space or in my life, but what does REASON ever really have to do with love…Mr. Ex, with whom I spent 15 and a half years too long, and with whom I should have just been friends and neighbors, used to argue relentlessly with me about the word LOVE, that it can’t actually be defined and therefore is meaningless and should not be used.  And the most recent ex which started off so positively and turned into a total clusterfuck of awful last year, well the word LOVE got thrown around a lot, but turned out to be positively meaningless: that whole ~actions speak louder than words~ business that we know we should pay attention to…Well here is a news flash…from the time of my very first butterflies in my belly and tingle at the base of my spine at 14 years old when I felt those first pangs of LOVE, I have used those feelings for that boy as my barometer for what I am feeling and if it is any good at all…nobody in my adult life ever gave me the tingle at the bottom of my spine like that boy with the big green truck all those yesterdays ago when I was still just a girl really, until now.

I have met a person who rocks my world.  I have met a person who reaches for my hand in my truck and I lose my breath.  I have met a person whose smile lights me up like a Christmas tree.  I have met a person who I have laughed more with in 24 days than I have laughed in 24 years.  I have met a person who sits on the couch and plays the guitar and drums for me and makes music in my life where there was none.  I have met a person who I felt so totally connected to within hours  of our  first meeting that I thought I had to be imagining things…that THIS was impossible, that THIS was too good to be true, that THIS was silly to feel so much so fast so suddenly so unexpectedly so profoundly so purely…that it had to be unreal, but it is real.  I feel like I have waited my whole life for this and I feel a little sad too, why didn’t I know him 27 years ago…I might have been spared a lot of tears and pain in this wonderful life.  The “spine tingle” as I have called it these 31 years, has been my barometer for what I am feeling, because as we all know, our brains can trick us and our hearts can lead us down really twisty gnarly paths that look so great until you get a bit farther down them…but the spine tingle, that is the realest real thing I can use to determine what I am actually feeling not what my brain or heart wants me to believe.  I might get my heart broken into a million little pieces, which worries my mother terribly…she just wants me to be happy and loved and adored and she thinks I am so close to perfect that she can’t understand why I seem to have failed over and over in my life in these situations and have this inability to find somebody who thinks I am as fabulous as she thinks I am…  I might get my heart broken into a million little pieces but why on earth would I let fear keep me from another try at love…whether it lasts 24 days, or 24 months, or 24 years, isn’t it really all we need?  I wrote, not all that long ago, that I had only been in love 5 times in my life but was dearly hoping for six…well that wish has come true.

This last winter when I started to see the therapist to deal with all the months of awful which left me more broken than I ever thought I would heal from, she had me listen to a poem called Sweet Darkness and the last line goes like this:  anything or anyone that does not bring you alive, is too small for you.  I felt a little bit dead for a lot of years…the wee-ones fill me to overflowing, but that is a different kind of joy, a different kind of filling.  I have been brought more alive in 24 days by this man than in the last 24 years.  My parents both have struggled mightily with my inability to find contentment in my life…“Happiness wants what it has,” has been beaten into my head my whole life, and now I finally get it, I once was blind but now I see.