Halfway Around the World

I feel like we all have someone who we would go halfway around the world for.

Don’t we?

My first someone I met when I was a sweet, innocent lass of sixteen. Never mind he was a manipulative predator. When I loved him, I loved him hard. Now I look back and think, ‘God, what was I thinking?’

I knew I could never have him forever. He was older, he came from a background of drugs and alcoholism and abuse. He was also unstable and a psychopath. He once said to me, ‘One day you’ll be married to a nice man who is just like you, and I will be languishing by the road somewhere, or dead, probably.’

I refused to believe that, at the time.

I was vehemently, irrevocably infatuated by him.

“No way,” I told him passionately, “I will be married to him, yes, but I will still be in love with you. I will always think about you, I will always want to be with you.”

I believed that so strongly.

Yesterday I was watching my husband as he put his shirt on for work. I watched how his brows furrowed in deep thought (they always are, he is going to have permanent frown lines), how his lower lip stuck out a little as it does when the cogs of his engineering brain are whirring. I even cast my eye up and down his physique because, well, he’s my husband, I’m allowed.

And my sixteen year old words echoed in my head as I did.

‘I will always think about you’

‘I will still be in love with you when I am married to him’

I didn’t know I would be married to D, though. I am not still in love with that animal of my past. I thought, at the time, since he was my ‘first love’, that I could never experience an attraction and connection this powerful.

They say you never get over your first love. They say your first love is always the strongest.

It wasn’t in my case. I thought it would be, because it shook my entire world, at the time, but the connection I feel with D is ten times more powerful. I love him more as each day passes. Sometimes, yes, I am irritated by him and we fall out, but that’s what any couple does. I can open up to him in a way I could never do with that predator. I never talked when I was with that predator. Only sometimes, but I never spoke about myself and my thoughts and my dreams and aspirations. But with D I am free as a bird. Maybe D is my real first love?

And yes, not a day passes when I don’t think about my ‘first love’, but it’s mostly horrified thoughts and thoughts of disgust, hatred and regret.

I hate him. I really do hope he is dead or languishing by the road somewhere, for what he did to me. Have I healed, yet? No. I know I haven’t. Sometimes my world constricts and gets darker and I am afraid and depressed and I know it’s him, lurking in some dark place in my mind, his terrorising threats echoing in my mind. When an unknown number calls me I still tremble like a leaf, even though I have changed my number several times. But I struggle out of it. It’s not fair to D, it’s not fair to me. Why should I stop living a happy, bright life because of some selfish maniac?

He wasn’t my first love, I realise that now. If he was, I wouldn’t have been able to drop him as quickly as I did when it got too much, and feel nothing, only relief.

Maybe I did love him a little, but I was young and it was probably just naive lust.

My point is, we all have somebody we would travel halfway around the world for. Maybe that somebody isn’t a lover, but a friend. Maybe a family member. I know I would travel seven seas on a rickety ship for my husband.

Who would you travel halfway around the world for?

 

The Temporal Length of the Universe

Hello.

Today the sun is out. We were promised an Arctic Blast this week. The wind as it blows is icy, but my legs were warm as I pumped them in the sunshine this morning on my way to the Glass Library. I needed to get there quick, to make the most of the shorter opening hours for New Year’s Eve.

I forgot it was New Year’s Eve. It’s just like any other day to me. Nothing remarkably special. We are celebrating another revolution of our planet around the sun. The moon will carry on controlling the tides, the winds will carry on blowing across the marshes, cows will continue to graze, blinking their eyes lazily, unknowing.

The world doesn’t know that it is entering a ‘new year’. It just hurtles towards it, carrying on as it always does.

The only reason we celebrate it is because we have a meticulous time-keeping system. But I like to think that time doesn’t particularly care for our recording of it. It plunges ever on, nonchalant. It glances it through the window at the party, gives a little smirk, and on it rushes.

We, of course, in our own little planets of life, are oblivious. Putting our make-up on, combing our hair, showering, writing lists of resolutions because 2016 is IT. It is the year we take charge of our lives and lose weight (or gain it) and become successful entrepreneurs and become the perfect versions of ourselves because 2016 is a new ‘beginning’.

But it isn’t really. Time is older than any of us. Time is older than the universe. To Time, 2016 is another year to add on to the billions. Another weary revolution, another flash through someone’s life.

Time will continue to hurtle and plunge and soar and sail, growing ever faster as the years are packed on to our ages.

Those are my thoughts for today. I hope your day today is time-worthy. I hope mine is too!