Exhausted from Loving

What is it about laying on your bed all week
That makes you dream.
A lot.
Call me lazy,
Or call me maybe,
But I plead food poisoning. Or dengue fever. Or love sickness.
Regardless, I can barely get out of bed.
And with this exhaustion of body,
Comes an exhaustion of spirit.

All week I've been gearing up to say goodbye to him.
And I'm all sapped out of loving things to say.
I'm all spent on the reasons I love him.
Because at the end of the day,
He's still leaving me.
And I'm still lying here alone.

And so I resist thinking about him.
I resist talks of a wedding.
I resist exchanging saliva-covered nothings.
Because I feel like I'm saying goodbye forever.
I can't do this.
And so I close my eyes.
And I see him.
I'm randomly escaping from a camp in the woods,
And he is in my getaway car.
Dang him.
I'm playing a game and I kiss someone.
I pull back,
And it's his lips I kissed.
It gets so I wake up and I don't know how he was in my dream,
But I remember him distinctly being there.

Ever get into a relationship that lasted all of 5 seconds?
Before the relationship you were probably like, forget women/men!
Suddenly when the relationship becomes a possibility,
Life is beautiful.
You skip around convincing people that all those other people were nothing.
THIS one is the one.
And then it happens.
Any one of a number things could happen - and it does happen.
And you wake up the next morning with a crushing realization that you're all alone again.
Time to start over.
Or give up.
Again.
Time to reconvince yourself that that person was NOT the one.
Time to embrace a new day full of new possibilites and new people.

This is me.
Knowing he wants me.
Knowing I want him.
But feeling like - of course it had to end.
Of course it was too amazing, too beautiful, too precious to be true.
Of course I'm alone.
Because in my mind, I fear that of all the things that can go wrong,
It won't be him or me this time.
It will be an airplane plucking him from the sky,
Burying him in the grounds of Australia.
And it will be death this time that cheated us both from love.

Silly?
Okay.
Absurd?
Fine.
But as he realized he had 13 minutes left to say goodbye to me, I could hear it in his voice.
The finality.
The ragged intake of breath.
The sweet nothings.
Never mind that we had been talking non-stop for hour upon hour.
13 minutes left.
And I felt cold all over.
The dial tone buzzed in my ear and my heart sank.
No guarantees.
I HATE goodbyes.
It's too much to hope I'll see him again.

It's crazy.
In the past he has disappeared around the corner,
He's left my arms to go get a drink of water,
He's driven 500 miles away to his home,
He's spent 22 years of his life away from me.
And in any one of those instances,
God could have taken him.
A wreckless moment, a freak accident, an internal failure.
Anything could have happened.
And I didn't fear that.
But now, he flies 14 hours literally to the other side of the world.
In two days, he is 10,500 miles away from me.
And I am paralyzed with fear.
I'm afraid from loving him.
I'm exhausted from the fear of losing him.

Who knew that love was so exhausting?
And I know.
God loves him more.
God is watching over him.
But, God.
I still fall on my knees.
Or I would if I could get out of bed.
And I beg you to spare him from everything that could go wrong.
I beg you.

And I know he is safer in your will in the middle of venomous spiders in Australia,
Than he would be out of your will and here at my house holding me.
God, I know you hold the world in your hand.
You know the hairs on his head.
You see the sparrow fall.
You own the cattle on the hills.
So I know you can guard him.
Please guard him.
Because selfishly,
I can't live without him.

A Love Exchange Student

Saturday May 4, 2013. How do you tell someone goodbye for the summer where you both go to separate countries and can't talk for months? Take it from the guy who just said he loves me for the first time. He planned an adorable weekend and got creative with saying goodbye. If you're going to read this, get a trash can and prepare to throw up from the sappiness.

First, we bought and stuffed each other build-a-bears to take abroad. Their names are Andy and Andi (he calls me Andi). He is such a good sport lol. He even picked out the heart to go in the bear and did the whole "rub the heart and make a wish" thing. This is the sign of a real and confident man. :P When I wished on the little heart I put in the build-a-bear, I wished that he would say he loves me. EW, sappy. See? I told you.

www.sisterhoodofthetravelingstamps.com 

Andrew started out the evening giving me a t-shirt to remember his home town. You know what was sweet, though? He gave this to me after I made him drive me around and take me to a meeting where he waited in the car with no guarantee that I wasn't going to mess up all of his carefully laid plans for the evening.

For dinner he took me to the Lazy Goat downtown (see below) where he had made reservations weeks ago. I'm not an appetizer/most-expensive-meal-on-a-date person but he insisted I get an appetizer because he knows I love different cheeses. From the window seat that he had requested for us in the restaurant we could see a couple slow-dancing on the TD stage and we agreed we should do the same after we finished eating. He's a planner and this girl is not complaining! There's nothing like getting all dressed up with your man and accidentally matching and then feeling like you're playing grown up. :) Then it's like, o wait, graduation just happened. WE ARE grown up.

 

 www.thelazygoat.typepad.com

Below is the bridge where our friendship started last November. It's an ironic bridge because I had expected to meet another guy there and Andrew appeared instead. Most of my first conversations to Andrew were of him patiently listening to me talk about another guy. I remember being surprised at how I had misjudged him. I heard him talking on the phone with his mom that night in November and I remember thinking that it was so cute how he talked to his mom because he clearly loved her. I thought at the time that I would want a guy who talked to his mom like that.  Since we're dating now, he took me back to this bridge and we took our first kissing picture.

  wedding.theyeagleys.com 

 

 

Right after this he got me coffee at Spill the beans (pictured below) and gave me like 4 pieces of heart jewelry. He was so excited to give them to me and so proud that he had picked them out lol it was cute.

www.tripadvisor.com

 

Saturday May 4, 2013, TD Stage in downtown Greenville, S.C. (pictured below). This is the date and place that he first told me he loves me. :)  He hadn't planned this but he had accidentally slipped a couple times referring to me as his love. So after Lazy Goat we took a walk around downtown and when I called him 'mi amor' teasingly under the TD stage cover, he turned me to face him and asked me, "Do you love me, Andi?" I said, "You first." He took a deep breath and earnestly/slowly said, "I do love you." I smiled and shyly said, "I love you, too." And he goes, "No, like, I REALLY love you." And I said, "I meant it, too." He then spent like the next 15 minutes standing on the stage declaring his love to me and all the reasons why he loves me.  I seriously was concerned he was going to drop down on one knee. It sounded like he had rehearsed it in his head and was never going to get a chance to say it again. I learned later that he was worried about saying he loved me because he had listened to my radio show where I had long ago said that a man should never say he loves a woman before he's been dating her for at least 4 months. We've only been dating for 2 months. Little did he know that I had just Googled that factoid and I was an idiot for repeating it!!

www.greenvilleonline.com

 

Andrew ended the evening with a hand-written card that he had written when he couldn't sleep because he was thinking of me. He admitted later that he had been tortured because he wanted to sign it "Love, Andrew" but because of what I had said on my radio show about not saying love too early, he regretfully signed it "Yours, Andrew". That made me smile. I took that card with me to Antigua and read it a minimum of 14 times.

 

While in Antigua for the last two weeks, I missed him so much that I wrote him a love letter every night. I found out later that he has been doing the same thing for me. We both agreed that we'll exchange our notebook of letters at the end of the summer.

 

See? Told you. Vomit. SO sappy. But sooo sweet. :) I love and don't deserve this guy - which is probably why I come to my blog less and less to complain about relationship problems. :)