3236 Days Since, 1 Left Until

Wow. Time flies.

In the month I've been keeping this blog, each day seemed to inch by, crawling along at its own steady, nerve-wracking pace.

Yet here I am, less than twenty-four hours before I'll board a plane and... well, I'll get off and see her. That's about all I know.

I talked to her today. Text messages were exchanged yesterday (she finally got the birthday card I sent her), but today she answered the phone and we had a half-hour conversation. I was nervous as hell, far from my usual articulate self. She was not, seeming much more at ease with the whole situation than I, but who knows whether that's a facade or not. She's always been much more relaxed, more "go with the flow" than I. She said she's not nervous, I have no reason to disbelieve her.

I remember nine years ago, getting off that plane. My mother & family were there, my future sister-in-law, and her. The phone conversations, the letters, all the lead-up to me walking off that airplane, I was as nervous then as I am now. I wanted to grab her, kiss her hard on the mouth, hold her against me, but with my family there, all I could really do was put my arm around her, rub her back a bit, smile at her and feel the emotional tension build in the air. It wasn't negative; it was just the situation dictating that we couldn't act on our wants or needs at that moment.

We went back to my mother's house, everybody stayed up talking for a while. Eventually, my brother & his fiance left, my parents went to bed, and after a bit of alone time, she had to go home for the night. I walked her to the car, grabbed her around her waist, and kissed her.

With that, all that tension, all those nerves and hormones, everything came crashing down into a perfect moment.

Maybe it will again.

She surprised the hell out of me today when she said "Let whatever happens happen." To hear that from her, to have my thoughts repeated to me, made me feel much more at ease. I told her that, while I have many things I want and hope for, I have no expectations of her. That, whether we spend every second of my two weeks together or we only have the airport, I want her to spend her time with me because she wants to, not because she feels she has to.

I don't think that will be a problem.

I asked her today if she believed in God, to which she assured me she did. I told her that, with that belief, she has to see that there is a reason I came back into her life, and that it happened when it did. That, as she's sitting in my ex sister-in-law's house, the woman that introduced us, talking about me, she gets a call from her sister-in-law that I'm trying to get a hold of her.

She seemed to agree.

The Major League Baseball All-Star Game is about to start, meaning that it's exactly twenty-four hours from now that I'll be taking off from John Wayne Airport, on my way to whatever awaits me.

Three thousand, two hundred and thirty-six days have passed since I last touched her.

One more until I will again.

I don't know if she loves me as much as I love her. But I do know that she loves me.

And that's enough.