IT’S EARLY OCTOBER, a month where the sun sets by late afternoon, and nights become long. I’m good, great really. Sentiments of anger and grief have been tirelessly spent and for the most part resolved by late April, through long talks with my mother and ice-cream. I’ve been running clear for months now.
My boyfriend wants to earn some money for a trip we are taking together the following week, and with a few days off from medical school he sets off on his bike to deliver food around the city on a very rainy Saturday evening. With my list of uni deadlines long enough to keep me occupied while he is out, I eat dinner alone, on the couch, while watching The Sinner and skim reading about HPV vaccine hesitancy.
When he returns, a remarkable mix of cold and sweaty, he presents me with a pair of new, soft pink pyjamas, knowing lounge wear is the only kind of wear I’m truly interested in. According to my boyfriend, a very very rich customer was feeling very very generous and threw 25 pounds at him as a thank you for delivering his pizza, intact and still hot! At this point he was near a store, still open at 8pm, and so purchased said pyjamas with change to possibly afford him a bus ride home.
When my boyfriend shows up on my doorstep holding these, I don’t know how to feel.
Do I deserve this love, much less this gift, that I am continually and so graciously handed?
As we first began dating, I wasn’t yet over the pain and mistreatment from my last relationship, bringing only passion and a flawed view of how love is supposed to be to the table. I was stubbornly dating someone else too, someone entirely wrong for me but with great hair and taste in TV shows, serving as the reason not to get too close. My now-boyfriend, ever the gent, was patient with me to the sweet end, and on one sunny April evening, we agreed to stop pretending, made a chicken casserole and toasted to something we thought may just stick if our instincts were correct.
As ever, there have been a couple of bumps. No one tells you that being loved in the way you always wanted tends to hurt at first. It’s uncomfortable, like overindulging on a dinner you were once ravenous for. Your favourite meal, with dessert to follow. Taking yourself to the couch to digest, you can only hope that this feeling will pass.
Our first argument, I wasn’t quite sure whether to leave, or stay and raise my voice louder than his (not a hard task as he has never been known to raise his much). Any disagreement, seldom but usually essential to moving forward, I prepared myself for an argument. Shouting, someone leaves, an apology, someone feels slighted, and the score updated. It never came, so I pushed harder for a reaction I had learned to want. “Am I upsetting you?” I asked him. “No, I just don’t think it’s me you’re angry at, is it?” I shake my head, caught.
I apologised each time I pushed him away, afraid to show him where it hurt incase he took note for later. He didn’t waver. When I wanted him to tell me what to do, he didn’t. When I wanted him to pick my scabs, he didn’t. On the one year anniversary of my abortion I’d had with my ex-boyfriend, I told him my baby would have been four months old now. In the morning, he told me there wasn’t anything I couldn’t tell him.
Somewhere in all of this, he taught me that we could disagree without the slamming of doors and cold shoulders. This is compromise, he said, and it feels good. He taught me how to appreciate old loves, whole-heartedly accepting that I am a product of the love I have experienced before, both good and bad. All at once I felt so absolutely seen, glitches included, and loved all the same.
Slowly, everyday, he shows me how to love and be loved in a better way, after years of coming up short. I am an old dog, and my boyfriend is determined to teach me some new tricks.
Our instincts haven’t failed us yet, and so as he stands in my doorway, holding the new, soft pink pyjamas he has just spent his well-earned tip on, I lean into him, close my eyes, and hope with everything I have that he continues to love me and let me love him like this, for the rest of our lives.
With all the bad things that happened last year, better things have followed, bringing with them a propensity for the softer sounds and feelings of life. With a restored sense of who I am and why things are the way they are, I decided it was time to write something that captured how I had gotten here, in the best way I could. Unfortunately, this screen had been blank for months before I was finally able to find the words. Now, I am ready. I have found the words, and I know exactly what I want to say with them;
With the right person, you will sleep so soundly. I didn’t before, tossing and turning, and I never knew why. Whether we’re sharing a bed , or I’m sleeping alone, all of the bad things that have gone before seem to make sense, and I sleep well in the knowledge that this is exactly where I am meant to be, always.
Alexandra Hague 