Unexpectedly: This Happened.

 


I don't get specific about this a lot, but ... the man I love lives four thousand miles away. He's been gone ten and a half years, and though there are plenty of folks who think that means I should love somebody else, I've never round reason to come to this conclusion. He's been suffering depression and any number of other setbacks over the past three years (if not longer), and there is no current plan for him to come home.

He left about a year and a half after my dad died, at a period I was still in mourning.

I have a joyous array of absolutely wonderful friends. My mom is in my town, and she and I get to spend good times together, with my stepfather, whom I love. My home is cheering and more than halfway paid for, and populated by the dearest dog and cat an ageing biddy could ask for. But without Mr. X, my life is ... less. I'm no gothic heroine, I'm not Penelope to his Odysseus. But I have never known anything else to do but love him. Even though I've looked, from time to time.

I can share none of my blessings with him in any way that makes a difference to his life, and the impotence is profound. Indeed, we go through periods we don't even communicate at all, which can be giddily terrifying, on top of the helplessness.

And it was almost at the same moment he left, less than two years after dad died, that my brother took me to a James River Writers conference, and ... life got seriously different.

My life doesn't need saving, but even so writing "The Ax and the Vase" did something like it.