How I Got Here

The road has been long and winding, that's for sure...too damn long if you ask me, but somehow I made it.  Got here... Right Now...To that place I dreamed of so many years ago.  Don't ask me how I made it, I honestly couldn't tell you. Life  was ugly and dark, so very cold and lonely....a hell, of sorts, on earth.  I almost stopped believing.  I guess when they beat you down enough it is hard to believe or trust in anything except the darkness you have come to know.  When I was 16, I knew what love was.  I knew it because I was experiencing it.  I knew it because I felt it - instantaneously.  I knew it as surely as I knew the stars shown in the Heaven's.  Sad thing is, I didn't have the first clue what on earth I was supposed to do with  the enormity of that love.  So typical of kids who haven't got a clue, I let the "real" thing go and he married someone else.  I carried him around with me, like a crystal in my pocket, for 25 long years...the blackest years of my life. I married too, of course, but those weren't marriages made in Heaven, unions applauded by God.  I married those men who would seek to destroy the very best in me.  They didn't succeed.  I am not wholly destroyed and these pieces in me can be mended.  I am the girl with the broken smile.  I am the girl who is remembering.  I am the girl that laughs...TODAY!  Throughout the years, I would seek him out.  There was something in me that held on, as if for life, to that one man.  I loved seeing him; I made it a point to see him; I made certain he never forgot I was out there.  Funny, now I don't think he would have ever forgotten even if I had never made those efforts.  We'd look into piercing eyes and despite our life's circumstances... everything was written there in the kinds of words that cannot be hidden or denied, we knew!  We still loved, we would always love, we love now.  When I was growing strong, he appeared like magic on a page.  A simple request answered in kind.  Six months ago, I started walking a path that was my destiny all along.  I knew it.  I knew the time was now and it was...it is!  Despite our separation & 25 years of changing, I always knew somehow, some way, some day in time our paths would cross again.  On August 30, 2010...they did.  Amazingly enough, our very first encounter all those years ago, happened on a hot August day too...August 27, 1985.  There he was, on the screen and my heart was stuck in my throat.  Was this it?  Was this finally it?  I am here to say, it was...it is!  Today I share a daily existence with the one man I have loved for as long as I can remember.  In August, he will propose to me and I will say YES!  A hundred, a thousand, a million times... YES!  I didn't know it was possible for one human being to feel such happiness.  I didn't know Love could be so right and beautiful.  I am learning not to be afraid.  I am learning that I am valued for who I am.  I am learning how to live without being yelled at, without being as invisible as I can be.  I am learning what peace really feels like.  I am learning and slowly I am facing the sun.  This man was not afraid of the walls that kept me cloistered in safety.  He climbed over them and immediately set to tearing them down.  He is changing my life...and I am changing, blossoming, growing.  I am BECOMING!  My children are too.  They are learning things they have never known.  They are embraced by a man who wants to be a father to them, who loves them as if they are his blood.  I had forgotten what it means not to be beaten down in every manner of the word, but he is changing that.  He has changed everything about my life.  I never thought I was a lucky person.  Always felt like I must have done something really bad to have ticked God off so much...thing is, I never could figure out what it was.  I don't claim to be perfect, oh Lord, I screw up more than I care to admit but I never thought I was a stupid woman or a bad one.  Somehow, I generally ended up with men who thought I was and really wanted me to believe it was true.  I didn't know it was possible to be with a man and feel this way...happy, content, comfortable and at peace.  Just as I did 25 years ago, I finally feel like I am where I belong.  Some things are just written in the stars, "Meant To Be!"  Maybe you don't believe that, but I do.  I believe in destiny.  I believe lifetimes have passed and he and I have always been interwoven so completely that you couldn't separate that bond if you tried.  We always find a way to each other.  Somehow!  We are often amazed at how it feels to be in the presence of the other...how it feels as if 25 years never passed...and I think in a way, they haven't.  We have always been together...we have always been one, even if it wasn't a physical presence.  We have carried the other so deeply inside of our hearts that we were never truly apart.  I once only dreamed and now I LIVE the dream!  I will live this dream, gladly, until the day I die and I will do so holding this man's hand.