I hadn’t seen her in about eight years, or was it nine?

There was some nervousness on my part at first, having to do with simply meeting someone from our old life. It wasn’t me or her I was concerned with, however, but my wife. At least I thought it had to do with her. As is most often the case, the issues are much closer to home.

There’s always been this sadness in me that what I love will surely be taken from me, even love itself. I know where this comes from now and grow my own, so to speak, but it’s been a long, hard slog through the valley of man-I-sure-fucked-up-my-life-again to reach this relative equanimity and finally-expanding joy. Most days “joyous” doesn’t fairly describe me [cough], but I’m getting there, in millimeters. Today I felt a bigger jump, as if something empowering had come to light.

My wife has had her issues with New Mexico that in my occasional terrors grow to be the things that send her back where we came from. Tonight at dinner, for example, when our old friend said she loved New Mexico and envied us for living here, my sweetie muttered, “Don’t!” Just the kind of thing to push my buttons in the past, though probably more revealing of anxiety over temporary circumstances than anything else. So even though I’ve left this all behind me, hohoho, I must have wondered if what we’d hear from back East would give my sweetie fits. Or me, for that matter.

But what useless nonsense! It was wonderful to see our friend, whom my wife immediately implored to tell her “what’s happened to everybody.” Not surprisingly, what’s happened is simply life. Most everyone is doing fine, and some are hurting. A fellow I knew in Chestertown — younger than I am, incidentally — died yesterday, in fact. It wasn’t hard to listen to at all, either, this human saga that we’d had a role in. It made me feel validated in a whole new way. I also think I needed to hear all this to see that once and for all, I wasn’t threatened, and that I had done the right thing by following my heart, as if anything else had ever been possible anyway.

This probably isn’t very clear. But I saw our old friend as closer to me as a person, somehow. More related, human-to-human. I like that. How very odd to feel all right. We could all use more of this.

So thank you, M., for all of this and more, and have a safe flight home. (You’re also the only one who might understand the title of this post, so I’ll be sending all the questions off to you.)

And now, we MARCH!!!