come live with me

“S just accepted an offer on the house,” I say while standing on G's back deck in the afternoon light. He is in the yard, shoveling fifteen cubic yards of dirt for me, for my vegetable garden, while I get started cooking dinner on the grill. “I have thirty days to get out.”

“Good - you’ll be moving in here soon then,” he says, stopping a moment to grin at me.

Later, as he is taking a break on the deck, each of us with a beer in hand, I ask, “You’re really okay with me moving in?” “Yeah,” he says, “I have been for a while. It’s you that’s needed time with it.”

I know that he is right, but it stumps me, regardless, that this relationship is real and really happening; that it's not a trick of the light, an illusion. Abruptly, he drops his shoe to the deck and says, “There - the other shoe dropped. Nothing’s changed,” looking at me sideways with a benevolent grin.

This man has been and continues to be, more than I could have ever dared dream for. How he knows what to say, when to say it, and when to shut up and wait for me to think it through, I don’t know. But somehow, he knows, and soon enough I'm putting myself where I said I would not put myself again.

Mystifies me.

When S and I finally split for good in 2008, I was sure I wouldn’t want to have a boyfriend again until the summer of 2009 at the earliest. I also knew I wanted to see G again, as I’d been attracted to him when he and I met the first time S and I split in 2007.

Fall of 2008, I was open with G that I wanted to see him, but that he could only be my gentleman friend at that time, not my boyfriend. I didn’t want to be in a commitment - just dating. He was fine with that.

I asked him to be my boyfriend two dates later. It was January of 2009.

And, to be honest, brutally honest, I was sure I’d never let G be my boyfriend, because he lived too far away. I knew I’d never leave Ann Arbor, so why get involved with someone from out of town?

Everything is different when it comes to G.

So, here I go again, willingly, where I said I would not go, doing what I said I would not do.