The Reason I'm Not There With Her

(Edited, July 6, 08)...Is not because I do not want to be there. I wish more than almost anything (e.g., she gets better) that I could be there. As I note in a subsequent post, above, she needs me or somebody like me there. And I don't think there is somebody like me there (mainly cuz really there is nobody like me, just like there's never been anybody like her...but i digress).

I am not 'there' because there's no place for me there. And that's because I am (and always have been, unfortunately) a 'complicating factor' in her life. Ours has been always an 'illicit' affair. She is married to and cohabitates with a man she doesn't love (hasn't, for a while), until recently mainly for her children. I don't know much about him. He seems to have been a good father, based on what I know of her kids through her. It may have become less important now they're (three of them: a girl and two boys) grown and out of the house. But her cancer (I wonder if she'll 'name' it, try tame it that way?) more or less abnegates any moves that would disrupt her domestic balance now. She needs her home, and peace, and not much drama, for the time being.

Me? Fuck-me-running, I'm "drama" on the hoof, innit? With a capital "D," a big laugh, and a long, white, unkempt beard...My mere existence threatens her domestic peace, say nothing of what my presence there would do. I shall keep my distance and await her invitation. It will come, eventually, I am certain (and hope, too, before the last extremity).

Something similar passed between us before. We were apart, totally estranged for nearly 8 years (through which time I loved her resolutely, if rather without hope). She harbored our love throughout, too, but she had three children to raise, and a career to accomplish, and a home to keep together, and I was really a distraction. So she ran me off, with a breaking heart, but with resolution of purpose.

I kept her eddress on my narrow-cast "copy-to:" list, to let her know I was still alive, but she never replied. The breach was total. But it wasn't permanent, and last year--within a couple of weeks after her last child graduated university--she called me back, asked if I was doing anything. Said she remembered i wasn't "beige," and she was sick of "beige," and was i busy? I wasn't, either beige or busy. Then we were together--at a distance, as before--again.

We're and have been always totally crazy about one another. It started the first evening we met, at a conference at UofI in Bloomington, In. Strangely (!), since we met and consumated our affair in October, 1998, we have spent no more than about 30 nights and days together. As well as hundreds of hours on the phone over the last year alone (Skype is a beneficence!). And scores of hours composing e-mails, back in the day before there was an IM app. We've been united again in person on two more occasions since last summer when we reconnected: Thanksgiving last year, and Spring Break this past March. A third had been planned--10 days in early May--and a score more anticipated, when The Cancer broke in. Still, this isn't over, by far...I am completely powerless, of course, but I am constant.

I can't complain. Th3 Cancer may have her goddamn lymph nodes, and her goddamn adrenal gland, and some bone tissue. But she gave me her heart, forever, a while ago. And we're resolved that we're gonna fight The Cancer for the rest of her, goddamn it!

I'll gotta get along with that. It's all I get...