The wonderful gift...

We broke up. I dumped her. I booted her out of my life. She was lovely, an absolute darling -- smart and thoughtful and completely crazy because she found me attractive.

The first time we made out was our third date. I didn't kiss her. I said goodbye. I went into my apartment and left her to her own devices. She texted me shortly that she was chugging water in her car, and that I should have kissed her. She called me a "chickenshit."

I charged out of my apartment where I knew her car was parked and opened the door without hesitation.

Three hours later I let her lips go from mine...

That's how we started dating.

Months later, one night we came home, drunk, with burritos. We were past the point where big gross bites were a negative and devoured the burritos around my kitchen island. My shirt was still clean and handsome, like my face and my hopes, unlike the rest of me. In my drunken mind, my burrito brain, I struck up the subject of tears... and my mom... and suicide... for lost but obvious reasons I unveiled various wounds and pains.

The night turned dark. Her head tilted. I swirled down down down.

From her perspective, a new(ish) man she new(ishly) loved was breaking... away way way. Funny, confident, tall, strong and me. He was rupturing before her eyes...

We were standing on opposite sides of the large kitchen island. In her instinctive intstinctiveness, and her goddamn good person hood, she made that perfect female compassion face and swept around the island to wrap her arms around me. I remember seeing her start to move sideways and suddenly I was engulfed by warmth, by her lovely beautiful arms...

It was the moment I'd been begging the Universe for-- I burst into uncontrollable tears.

I wept into her and her strong mind, challenging her strong shoulders with my heft and heavy desperate desperation. I hated the vulnerability she provoked but  I couldn't resist it. My long-warn wall crumbled faster than my manhood could repair it. Masculinity fell out of the bottom and for the best and briefest of moments I was totally purposeless.

She guided me to the bedroom and to the bed and to above the sheets and I clung to her with utter submission. I sobbed. I moaned. I wrenched. I erupted pain.

She took it.

I'll never forget her strength that night.

I'd never cried so hard before and I'd never needed to cry so hard before, except always until then. Years of protecting my mother and myself from her bipolar had built a shell. A shell I protected, a wall I hid behind. I protected it for decades, fortifying it with smarts and attitude and funny and impenetrability, because it was safer than being honest... And then she... through the mere act of acknowleding turmoil and trusting me with warmth. And telling me I was safe... she gave me the gift of rupture, of not holding it in, of not feeling fear.

I flooded her neck and nape and collar and my own pillow. With each shudder she squeezed and with each squeeze I felt safer.

Hours.

We barely knew each other.

It was the freest I ever felt, the least scared, the most honest in a life of dodging fear and fleeing honesty...

Such a beautiful gift she gave me.

I needed to feel pathetic for a change, not strong, and she let me...

We took turns at that for a couple years. Then it ended.

I still smile, though, because how could two humans entangled so, even briefly, not grow...?