Life is a strange thing.
For all the hate I harbor in my heart’s hearth, life itself, I cannot understand the irony that is the love I have for my wife and son.
Yes, I too have heard that you cannot love someone else should you not love yourself. That argument implies that one must first understand by one’s own experience what it is they wish to do in order to be able to do it. I don’t disagree. However, it is not uncommon for people to breathe, blink every few seconds, or think, and if you ask them how they do it, they’ll probably give you a look of astonishment and say something along the lines of: “well heck, I don’t know!” That is because some things are inherent and not necessarily learned through practice or doing.
I can say that attraction may have been a part of it. Seeing her in her own environment, being funny and without filter, exciting, and loud, all of which I was not accustomed to was an immediate attraction. Interestingly, the story of how we finally came to be was a bit of a mess. I dated her boss for a bit, but somehow through it all we continued to flirt with each other in one form or another. Shortly thereafter, we attended her best friend’s wedding and could not keep our eyes from one another, hiding under our breathe the desire to be with one another.
Finally we ended up, under the stars one night, our own fairy tale if you will, lying on our backs on an empty road, her body on the ground opposite of mine with our arms under our heads supporting each other, heads side by side, staring upwards towards the starry field above us atop that high mountain where we parked; no clouds in sight, just our breaths, and quickened hearts beating as we just hoped to be with one another. To my surprise, and much to her plan, we did not kiss that night. I was a bit dismayed that my charms did not work on this wild stallion, but what I didn’t know was that love lurked, even then, behind our every stare.
Later we took a long trip. Living in Puerto Rico at the time, the tiny island that was our home, we went to some town to pick up mattresses, then decided to take the long way back home, and used that time to talk. We told one another so many truths we wouldn’t have told anyone else. We found it easy to confide in one another even then, even before there was a relationship. We had our hard times too. I, a young man with many piercings and an affinity for the dark to include witchcraft, satanism, death metal, and many other things, seemed to find appropriate the misfortunes I had encountered in life up to that point. Some of those misfortunes included in no certain order, being raped, being abused physically and mentally while seeing the same being done to my family members, seeing the effects of alcohol and the possibility of its addiction first hand from my father, almost dying from an asthma attack, almost dying from driving recklessly and putting those in the car with me in peril of the same, running away from home, suffering from depression and migraines from early teenagehood, and so much more... all those truths bare and without cushion shared with this person I liked, all while knowing just how much I liked her and wanted to be with her; a small fear of rejection I will never forget with every muttered word.
Funny remembering my first experience with her now deceased father… a short man with glasses, sweaty from the humidity of most nights in the island and the hot apartment in which he lived. This apartment, a place that seemed run down, with trash from wall-to-wall I dare say, totally unkempt both home and self. This man looked me up and down, my long hair, my many piercings -eyebrows, ears from top to bottom, and tongue-, my black clothes, and my cocky stature, my tattoos, and by my side his daughter… yeah, I admit, today I look back and see with much clarity exactly what the man saw. But that night, I felt judged, betrayed by reason, for I knew what to expect before arriving, the same treatment and look I got from everyone else, disdain and disgust!
There was a moment when my spouse took me to her best friend’s home, a person I’d never met before. It was a birthday celebration if I recall correctly, and during it, with a clown in attendance doing something or other with the children, having left the microphone unattended, there in front of all those strangers I took to the microphone to profess my love to my then girlfriend… a notion that did not go unnoticed. Another occasion that merits mention was a morning like many we had in her apartment, she was taking a shower, and fully dressed, with my high boots, long jeans, and tight shirt, just opened the curtain, went inside the tub, and just gave her a hug. I just held her for a moment, both getting wet under the soft falling water of the shower over us both….
I love my wife. When we moved in together for the first time, we were living with friends in an apartment close to the university. We had many fun times there, her with her best friend, and I getting to know her friends which were a lot more sane than my own. Shortly thereafter we decided to move to the United States where I had lived years before and perhaps start our life there. We arrived to Florida in December of 1999 and by February 2000 we were married, only 6 months after having met one another.
A short time after, in August of the same year, I joined the United States Army. By this point in my life I had known love, had been betrayed, saw life and many of its aspects from the very streets where many a tale of horror is born. I myself was almost shot on the face on those streets by an angry and jealous boyfriend whose girlfriend I had kissed… but that is a story perhaps for another time. I knew life, and life was not kind. All I had learned in my 23 years of life was that betrayal was common, lies as oxygen were both as needed in order to live as food or water, treating your loved ones with disregard, disrespect, and hatred was normal, and obviously much more; very few good lessons had stuck with me. It was only 3 years back that my father had told me on a moment when I was being thrown out unto the street by the people I was living with at the time, that not only did my father not want to see me on his death bed, but that to him, as he liked saying: “you are as good to me as a zero to the left”, and claimed that I no longer was his son. Religion and the god of the Christianity had let me down, no other god under the heavens or soil had ever responded to me, and tragedy ruled my life in all aspects.
At Florida, we went out very often my spouse and I. We took pictures frequently, and loved going to the movies and being next to each other very much. One day after a movie we decided to walk home, a long walk indeed, perhaps 45 minutes or longer. We talked about so many things. We discussed where to live, why, what state, what jobs we’d enjoy, what things we liked, what we would do if we ever won the lottery -even though we don’t play it-, and so many other things. We were in love. Military life for me, during those years, was not kind on the marriage for many reasons. I was always away on training, later in wars, and finally in 2004 when I finally left the military after 2 war deployments she and I began our marriage. During the time that I was home we had fun. We watched tons of stuff together, we decorated the apartment really cool with hanging vines, and figurines we began to collect together, we always ate what we wanted which was mostly frozen food, but we were thrilled to spend time with each other. Every moment was bliss. At some point I took to video gaming, on the computer, rather heavily and began to go to sleep a bit later than her, but I tried real hard to give her as much of my time as possible because… well I loved her and enjoyed being next to her. It may sound silly but it’s the truth. We lived a fairy tale of our own making. After the military we moved back to Florida with my in-laws, the same who received us back in 2000, and lived there for 4 more years until which time I had graduated from university, my spouse had given birth to our wonderful son after many miscarriages, and my spouse was in a job she enjoyed very much, a job that supported us both since I was not-yet working being a full time student and after university full-time dad.
We had a lot of fun. We used to go to a nearby marina where hundreds of boats either floated by or were docked there for the season at various times of the year. There was also a park there where we walked a ton, held hands, and continued to talk about our plans for the future, and enjoy one another. We lived in a tiny room in my in-laws’ home; my son, my spouse, and I along with a ton of the boxes where we had boxed our military lives in all surrounding us in our tiny space of heaven. We made tables with some of the boxes, used others for supporting other things, needless to say we got very creative with the tiny home we had in that room. My wonderful spouse all the while working hard and with a smile from ear-to-ear every night when she came home to take our son from my hands so that I could study, do homework, and when possible watch a movie with her, or perhaps get a little game cession going for myself. My boy’s hands over mine as I played first person shooters games, car racing games, or other multiplayer games. His little hands over mine laughing when I punched in some keys on the keyboard moving left or right by pressing the A or D keys respectively to do so, or his hand moving all over the place as I moved the mouse and his little hand propelled his body in all kinds of directions as I moved, laughing all the while. But it wasn’t just us three. My father-in-law and I talked all the time. He, a philosopher of sorts, talked about his beliefs and why those beliefs came to be, and we often discussed many subjects. My mother-in-law, bless her heart, another fantastic person, always available, listening, and too eager to all sorts of stuff, whether it was cooking, talking, giving us directions to go to places, or hundreds of other things. I will never forget how important my father-in-law and mother-in-law were in making all those things possible.
I had such an incredible time going out to walk my son, when still a baby, I would place him on the stroller and just walk around the neighborhood with him, singing songs of childhood, and learning the entire time we were out, both he and I. So many were the times when I put some kid show on the background for him as he was going to sleep while I typed a university paper on the background. My spouse and I were already big Disney fans before our son, but after he came about, we began to rewatch all the old VHS tapes I still had, rerun after rerun, sometimes leaving the rewinding of the VHS for after the boy fell asleep. I sang to him, read to him, rocked him, carried him, played with him, and did everything with him. Yet, when mom arrived from work, her face would always light up with such an incredibly glow of happiness… I could never get that from her, but it was and is alright, he is her boy and she loves him her way, and I admire that!
I fell in love again with her again and again during our time together. Her strength as a person during our separations during the military, while writing letters to one another, me having to hang up our once-a-month phone call because we were being attacked and I didn’t want her to worry. Her strenghts as a woman and person every time we planned to have a child and destiny brought about a miscarriage and all of the pains, anguish, and agony that I will never understand as a man, but saw so clearly in her tears and felt as we hugged. I fell in love with my spouse so many times… I still do. After almost 20 years, we have undergone so many pressures, overcome so many impossibilities, seen so much tragedy and error, and lived through it all with the strength that we provide one another.
We now have a home for the first time, our son thrives, and our marriage has seen good and bad things and surpassed it all through our love. Whether it was during a long conversation about this or that, a hug at night, an impromptu kiss, a flower at work, a whole week of birthday gifting and celebrating, what seems like an endless assortment of gifts during Christmas, or just a quiet look into each other’s eyes… those eyes, she kills me with her eyes. They are brown, dark enough to look black from a distance, but clear enough to see the imperfections in them when we stare closely into each other's gaze. They are small and sexy, true and honest, and share with me still the love they shared that night staring at the starry skies.
I love my spouse not because of a court appointment or paper we signed in front of a judge one afternoon in February in the year 2000, but because the same way I enjoy breathing without as much as a clue as to how I am able to do it, the same way I love her without a clue of where it is coming from, where it draws its strengths from, or how it all works. I just feel peace, peaceful, and at peace every moment of the day I think of her, which is too often I dare admit. That is not to say that things are perfect, they are not.
We have our disagreements, from time to time. Yet, we find a way to come to terms with those disagreements. One thing we developed was to tell each other when the other is getting out of hand, especially if the conversation(s) with our son is going a bit longer than necessary. A mere look, that is all it takes for the other to know that enough has been reached. I don’t remember agreeing to that signal being the it that would stop something, yet it does, it works, and we use it. Like that, there are so many little things, quirks, and mannerisms we have both arrived to, obtained, or developed through time as a means to deal with things as necessary and all the meanwhile being respectful and thoughtful with one another. It is not easy by any means, adults are complex creatures with very different likings and almost daily changing natures, yet we have managed to cope with the changes, talk about the things we like and do not, and come to an agreement in most cases, on others where an agreement hasn’t been made, we are still working on it!
It is interesting to see her bring work home in her head, talk to herself trying to arrive at a solution, or perhaps just sit somewhere and just stare at a wall while machinating complex scenarios which will help her with something. She never really did explain that to me, but I find it to be a very interesting and unique way to deal with problems, and I must say, it works for her. Other times she would be folding clothes, and I can hear her voice coming from the room and just stand by the stairs listening to her going on about this or that, having a full conversation with herself about just about anything under the sun. It’s peaceful, because I know whatever it is she is concentrated on, she will be able to see it through or clearly by the time she is done with her thing. Other times, she’d get coffee and sit on the living room rocking chair or on a chair outside on the front porch and just admire the little things around her that sometimes go unnoticed, a mantle on a table, a cat toy in a place where none should be, or just looking out in contemplation of where her life has taken her and all of the things she has been able to accomplish to date… all these things in silence, without ever telling me about it, but somehow in my love, I just feel it all, know it to be that, and feel at peace as she does.
Some part of me knows she doesn’t like reading, long stuff at that, and perhaps this may fall in that category. Yet, I hope that one day you can read this my lovely Karen and know in a very small way what you mean to me.
