Okay, I think things are fine now. But thank you, everyone, for standing in my doorway yesterday. (In case you are new and wonder what the Sam Hill everyone was talking about in the comments yesterday when they said they were standing in my doorway, a few years back my friend Paula got...cancer...[what movie was that? Where the mom would only whisper the word so it wouldn't get her?] and I got on a plane, flew to Seattle, rented a car, screamed downtown to her hospital, parked in the middle of the night on the corner of Crack and Ho, ran through the 10,348 confusing corridors and got to her room. Where because I abhor hugging, I stood in her doorway and said, "Hey!")
So that's why when things are dark, over here, everyone in the comments says that. Now you can go about your regularly scheduled life.
But thank you, and thank you to my nonimaginary friends who I know in real life who wrote me or called me and said I could talk to them if I needed to. I heard from my old college friend Dot, and Marty Martin, and LaUral and Jo and really I am lucky people like me because there's no reason to.
Ned and I hit another rough patch, which is disconcerting and terrible and EXCELLENT for my diet. I had about 15 points I didn't even use yesterday, so score! But while we were rough patching and thinking this may not work out after all, the whole time we just kept saying how much we loved each other, and that there had to be a way to work things out. And I think we did. I hope we did.
Last night, late, Ned sent me this picture.
I had taken it in March of 2012, when I was at the beach with my friend Sleeping Beauty. Ned told me when he saw this picture, it was the first time he started to think, "I might love this person."
I wrote him back and said it's a good picture, and I'd have loved me, too, and please see above re how no one should like me.
When I was married to Marvin, we hardly fought, and when we did it was in the first two years of our relationship. We met in October and moved in together in February, so things moved along faster than they have with Ned and me. I wonder if maybe Ned and I are just going through the part where shit gets real, and it's no longer that "Oh, new relationship! Yay! This person is so fascinating! Yay! Oooo, new-person sex. Yay!" and onto wow, now I have to deal with this person's actual peccadilloes and armadillos and so on.
I don't know, man. I can't figure it all out right here. But I do know I can't lose someone I just spent a good 15 minutes with discussing who he'd tap: Mrs. Butterworth or Aunt Jemima, and whose final word on the subject ended up being, "If you have a three-way with Mrs. Butterworth and Aunt Jemima, it's bound to get everyone sticky."
I mean, I just can't live without someone who thinks that way. I just can't. Ned is my person. Ned and his salad-eating, bad-tempered, cat-loving, sports-obsessed, Mrs.-Butterworth-tapping self. I can't imagine him not being my person. And I hope I never have to find out.
