Personal News

I’ve been out of it today, for some reason. I woke up poorly, and then I had trouble focusing on just about everything. I got some work done, but not enough. We’ll see if I can have a more productive day tomorrow.

Upcoming Events and Such

We leave for Boskone a week from Thursday. We’ll have quite a few books available at the table. About 20 soft copies of The Repossessed Ghost and around 20 of One for the Road.

The Topic: Melissa

I might have failed to write my post today, but Melissa saved me. She found me sitting in front of my work laptop, not working but just doing nothing with intense purpose. I was listening and partially watching someone play Lethal Company on Twitch while also mindlessly playing solitaire over and over. There’s something very soothing about taking the chaos of the cards and rearranging them into order.

Chaos. If I am a champion of order, Melissa is an agent of chaos. If she were a cat, she’d be the sort that walks on the tables, knocking over glasses and anything left too close to the edge. On more than one occasion, I’ve seen Melissa reach over and disrupt whatever neat piles I may have assembled, because it’s too orderly and chaos must reign. She gives my minor O.C.D. quite a bit to contend with.

She just brought me a cup of hot, cinnamon apple spice herbal tea. Of the all the tea options, this is my favorite. It’s good enough that I question if it is really tea. This drink reminds me of the drink I first gave to Melissa while we both lived in dorm 518. She was sitting in the hall, complaining with her friend Smith about their hot chocolate being a bit chalky. We were in New Mexico, and it was cold, and I had a care package from my Mom which included some powdered bags of cinnamon apple cider. I ran some water through my coffee maker, took her a cup, and she loved it. That’s when we became friends.

Some time later, she found me practicing pool in the day room and asked if I had a car. I did. An ’87 Mustang GT I bought from someone else in dorm 518. One might look at the situation as her asking me out, but I figured she was just looking for a ride. We went to the Alamogordo theater and watched Dumb and Dumber. Smith accompanied us.

She borrowed my VCR once so she could watch some spicy movies. I remember swinging by her room after I’d gone to the commissary. I showed her this short sleave silk shirt I’d just picked up, and she borrowed that, too. I didn’t get the VCR back, nor the shirt, until after we were married.

I loved her before she loved me. I was devoted to her before she saw me the same way, but I had something going for me that no else did: I was honest with her. I wasn’t trying to use her. I called her out on her bullshit, which wasn’t hard because we were both young and absolutely full of it.

Twice during the time before we got married, she threw her hairbrush at me. Hard. Both times I caught it just a couple of inches in front of my face. I don’t think she ever meant to actually hurt me with those throws, and I also think that if I hadn’t caught it the way I did, we probably wouldn’t have wound up together.

I listen to her. She used to be angry with me, that I could listen as deeply as I did, sometimes without appearing to pay her any attention at all.

There’s a tiny version of her in my head. It’s basically all of the memories I have of her put together, creating a version of her in my mind that lets me figure out what she wants and needs. Sometimes, Melissa gets upset with the little version of her that lives in my head.

To know a person is to love them, or maybe it’s the other way around. When Melissa reminded me that I needed to write my post tonight, I asked her, “What should I write about?”

She jokingly said, “Me!”

There are lots of ways to describe someone, but I think my description of Melissa tonight can only be created through sturdy, unassuming love. The kind of love that looks weathered and beaten, but is strong enough to support a relationship for decades. The world will press against us, and I may despair from time to time, but I know Melissa, probably better than she knows herself. And this is my love language.