“For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.”

Somedays, I’ll be sitting there at work, and I’ll think of him. I’ll think of my husband and his strong soft hands, his kind laughing brown eyes, his awesome rear end and I’ll smile. I’ll grin, and I’ll feel that quiver all over again-the quiver I felt years ago, so many years past, when we were just young and I was a wild mess of adolescent rage and he was just alone in a small town making music. That quiver which pierced my heart when I was just a girl.

I didn’t intend on falling in love-not ever. I had distanced myself from those needs, even so young I was walled off and had my defenses set to stun, phasers! I told myself that life alone would be ok. I’d have cats and vacations, lots of breakable things and curry. The walls of my home would be multi-colored and jewelled.

I wrote him a letter after reading his in a magazine, purchased on a long drive north to a town on Lake Superior, a grief stricken move, a father, a daughter, me high on codeine after having my tonsils out 2 days prior. I read his letter and something quivered and twinged and I wanted to write him.

And yet…that letter became lost, lost in my room, a cavernous void, a mess that could suck dry a household. I didn’t think of it again until months later, I found it behind a dresser. I sat down on my floor and stared at it. I opened it up to read it, to see if it still represented me. I sealed it up again, and mailed it that day.

Months later, letters later, I called him. I’d be travelling near him-did he want to meet?

And we did. I got off the Go bus and waited near some crappy little store, leaning on the phone booth when he pulled up in his parent’s Olds. I met his eyes, and I felt like he was an old friend I hadn’t seen in years back for a visit. A moment of spark. A second of history I couldn’t account for. But I knew him. Somehow, I knew him, my body knew him.

A vague craving for him sprung up inside me which I quickly dampened. I had renounced all these things and besides-years of being told I was unattractive had taught me a lesson about that. I packed away my own desire, and only felt it pine once as he held his girlfriend in a pool and they laughed and laughed.

Time passed, I moved, moved again. We’d meet now and then, and I’d still feel it. I’d feel the desire I had for him, the unexplainable need to be with him. We could talk for hours, never feeling uncomfortable or strange. It really was like we’d known each other forever. I visited him in a scummy rooming-house in Guelph, slept on the floor near his bed, wishing he’d lay with me. Feeling him near me, and yet knowing it just wasn’t right. Not then.

My last year of high school, I visited on break in March. We stayed up night after night, talking, smoking weed-I got to the point where I was completely mad from lack of sleep. And one night we kissed. One night, his lips trailed fire up my neck and I felt the warm embrace of the one thing I never thought I’d find-love. It filled me inside, it boiled over into everything I touched as I waited for the year to play out, and for my life with him to begin.

And it did, as all things do. And ten years later, I am still madly in love with him, he who is now my husband, he who I am tied to with many bonds. When I let him, he heals me. My heart aches for him, and he soothes it. His laugh is gentle, and he cannot bear to see me suffer.

Some-days I sit around and think of him and laugh. I just cannot believe that I deserve such a blessing.