Ready or Not?

Each Sunday, he leaves. He returns to his side of the mountain, to a world she was working really hard at getting to know before he moved again. He moved a few months ago to a place where she's not comfortable staying overnight. There's not much to talk about when it comes to that. He knows it. She knows it. And there's nothing to be done about it.

So, more often than not, he's the one who leaves.

There are days when she's anxious for him to pack up his computer and head down the stairs to his sports car, ready to have her space returned to her, ready to have the sole bathroom available for only her use.

Especially on Sundays, she is ready for those few quiet hours before the hectic week begins, for the peaceful hours to herself. She reads. She cleans. She watches movies he doesn't want to see. She prepares herself for what she will face heading back to work on Monday.

Her contentment after his departure proves her budding theory that she is not ready to get married, that, in fact, after too many of those conversations that dance around marriage and kids, she feels slightly sick to her stomach, like she's eaten too much ice cream. It proves that they are not ready to get married (not that he's asked).

She sometimes finds herself getting anxious, eager for the time when she'll be one of the women looking at dresses and picking out colors, giggling with her bridesmaids. But that's a wedding, not marriage. She's not ready for marriage. She likes that he is her boyfriend, not her fiance, not her husband, but her boyfriend. She enjoys that he has his own apartment -- on his own side of the mountain.

If all of this is true.

If she is so content with the current situation.

Does it make sense for her, every Sunday night, to long for the time when neither of them has to leave?

Acceptance

She has finally begun to see that she will not have a life even remotely resembling the one she once envisioned:

A worthwhile job.
An adorable house.
An adoring husband.
Two or four or six kids running amuck.
All starting with a husband at 22.

Of course, the husband at 22 never materialized, and she's ridiculously grateful that she's had the intervening years to find herself, discover her identity. She would have made a horrible wife at that age and would likely not make a good one right now, not yet anyway.

After a series of hopeful comments and interesting discussions, she paused to think about the life she now sees for herself.

For the first time, there is a blank slate.

This is at once depressing and a great relief. There is no particular life towards which she is aspring. Certainly, she wants to get married (and specifically, she wants to marry him) and have children (his), but there is no outline for how this will occur, no deadlines, no specific script that must play out in order for her to obtain happiness.

"Have you ever struggled with wanting to be successful and than realizing that being happy could be the same as being successful?" She asked him.

"Yes." He said.

And with that word, she remembered why she fell in love with him in the first place.

Glimpses of herself in a charming cafe in Boston, New York, heck, even Chicago or what about Rome, dot her imagination, but they don't drive her. She once craved a life in New York City, the Big Apple, Manhattan Island, where she could prove her mettle and make it once and for all. She once craved, as Michael Cunningham said, more of the same, a life exactly like the one she imagined her parents had at the start of their marriage. A tiny house with a big back yard, lots of love and frequent barbecues in that big backyard.

She never envisioned a quiet apartment with the wind howling outside, sitting alone on her couch at 26, pondering her future. But she is fast understanding that, though she held onto it for years past its expiration date (should, in fact, have come to terms with it perhaps as many as ten years ago, when she started college with no boyfriend to her name and no clue as to what she wanted other than a husband), the life she envisioned for herself is not the one worthy of her, not the one meant for her.

She finds it a great relief to pause and consider the life in the future and realize that a life unscripted is the only way to live.

This unscripted life could be less than what she planned, but it will also be more. It will lead her places she never foresaw and others she would have eschewed as impossible as little as a year ago. It will be better. It will be worse. It will be the same. It will be different.

But, most of all, it will be hers.

Twice

He sat with the Starbucks coffee cup between his legs, "Wow, that's hot."

In the passenger seat, she maneuvered a few things and freed up the second cup holder, "Here." She reached over and took his cup, setting it in the holder, "We don't want you to boil your boys," she smiled teasingly.

"Nope." He kept his eyes on the road. "Or we could just have all girls."

A strange, hopeful feeling filled her. It was the first true time he had openly suggested that they would have children together, that the children he would have in the future would also be hers.

"Well, in that case," she jokingly reached for the hot coffee.

"Seriously, geckos tend to have girls when the eggs are kept over 80 degrees or something."

The moment passed, and they started talking about the lore of babies born in the summer mostly being boys.

But there had been the moment. And for today, that was enough.