I am a woman in love...

When I met him several years ago, it was love at first sight. Actually, it was lust at first sight. Whatever it was, I felt it the first time I saw him. He was the perfect specimen. Handsome. Great smile. Bright. All put together.

I knew from the first day that he was unclaimable and untameable, but I am a woman with high hopes and great expectations where my powers of seduction are concerned. As persistent as I have been, he has been equally resistant. He has never wavered from his original stance: there is no hope of any kind of lasting, permanent, or exclusive relationship between us. Even though I suspected from the beginning that this would turn out to be yet another one of my impossible relationships, I fell hard for him anyway. And I have remained a fallen woman ever since. Sadly, I have no idea exactly how he feels about me; he has spent more than a decade carefully crafting vapid and indecipherable answers to my direct and divers questions.

We share one of those relationships that defies definition. Friends? Confidants? Paramours? Lovers? Soul mates? None of those terms is adequate. None is broad enough. None is refined enough. The English language is restricted and restricting at times. Spanish and Italian have words that more closely approximate our special connection, but are hardly worth listing here because I would have to define them with those same inadequate, inapproximate English words.

Communicating with him isn't easy; he is a slow responder. Impatient soul that I am, I am usually the one to initiate contact. Most of the time, I do not even wait for a response to one before I launch another one his way. I keep no secrets from him; I cannot think of anyone or anything important in my life that I haven't told him about. I cannot say the same for him; he doesn't reach out to me nearly as often as I reach out to him. And when he does, he doesn't reveal as much as I want to know. He's the elusive, intangible one.

Eventually, when he feels like it, when he isn't busy someplace else with someone else, he responds. His counterreplies are literally sweet nothings - as cliche as that sounds. His messages are enlightening, but unintelligible. I send dozens of questions to him that I hope and expect him to answer and receive smiley faces and blank stares in return - if I receive anything at all.

Then, as suddenly as he appears, he disappears, and darkness reigns supreme yet again. For days, weeks at a time. Nothing I do or say or write lures him out of hibernation. I can do nothing but wait.

Even though weeks often pass without any indication that he remembers me at all, when he shows up, I am  never disappointed.  Never. Waiting for him is, indeed, the sweetest sorrow of all. His presence in my life, veiled though it is most of the time, is one of my life's greatest pleasures - and one of its most undeniable addictions. With the jitteriness of a drug addict waiting for the high to take effect, I anxiously await his always perfectly timed, preposterously short-lived reappearances in my life.

I'd be lying if I said that I don't often fall asleep with his name on my lips and the image of his face in my mind. I'd be lying if I said that I don't often fantasize about the next time I will see him - even though I know exactly when that will be.

He is the love of my life. He is a friend to my mind and my soul. He has power over my emotions and my body and my spirit. The saddest truth of all is that I am certain he doesn't know any of this. In actuality, he has no idea that I exist.


I saw him again today. Not only in my dreams this time, either. In real life. I was out on my early morning walk, pumping my pink 2 pound dumbbells furiously. I crossed one of the intersections in my neighborhood, looked over my left shoulder, and there he was - as alluring, enticing, seductive, heart-stoppingly gorgeous as ever.







High above the rooftops and church peaks hung my friend and companion in all his glory...
The Full Moon.

What? Who did you think I was talking about???