A number of years ago, on an abnormally quite hot, but otherwise beautiful summer evening in the magnificent Pacific Northwest, I had the most uncomfortably gorgeous man my eyes had ever seen strike up a conversation with me. Despite my ludicrous mishandling of what should have been a standard social engagement, Uncomfortably Gorgeous continued to pursue his interest in me in the days that followed.
I told him that I sat at home on Friday nights in a rocking chair, knitting on one side, the newspaper on the other, open to the comics and the crossword puzzle, of course. He persisted.
I told him that I had two young children that didn’t share the same father. <Gasp!> His messages kept coming. As did his kindness, as did his humor. <Swoon!>
I divulged that I got a job that only worked graveyard shifts to accommodate… the NHL schedule and that ultimately, during hockey season, my entire existence revolved around that schedule. I still woke up to, “Good morning, gorgeous.” messages.
This continued for a couple of weeks until one day, Uncomfortably Gorgeous popped the looming question, “Will you have a beer with me this Friday?” Heart palpitating, palms sweating, and intermittent and uncontrollable bouts of giggles just about taking me out, I panicked. He was, after all, Uncomfortably Gorgeous. So I told him, “I have to work on my motorcycle this weekend. But as soon as my motorcycle is fixed, I would love to.”
It wasn’t a lie. My motorcycle had broken down. And the part was hard to find. Really hard. And riding my motorcycle came in just a hair underneath the NHL schedule in priority status in my life. But boy, did Uncomfortably Gorgeous seem like he could waaaaay too easily start squeezing himself into a chair next to mine during a game or on a motorcycle next to mine on some windy road… And that freaked me out. It’s not as if I couldn’t drive my car to have a beer with him. My car was the most magnificent and impossibly reliable hooptie one could imagine. 460,000 miles on the original engine and counting! (At that time, anyhow.) But it did have it’s quirks - like my Trusty Navigator & Best Friend Extraordinaire, who, as you may have surmised by her title, was often the occupant of the passenger seat of said car, and whom I shall call Carly Lewis, to protect her anonymity, you see, had to supply her side of the car with a plastic bin to sit on the floorboard in front of her. Why, you ask? Because if it was raining, as it often does in the PNW, water, in real monsoon style, would cascade ever downward from beyond the dash panel and onto one’s footwear. A robust saturating would take place. The plastic bin served as an inner-auto-canoe, you see. As well as navigate, Carly’s job as the passenger side occupant was to man the windshield wiper on that side, of course, and one or both of us would have to enter and oft exit the car from the windows, as the doors came with accidental, imaginary sensors that functioned in a manner they never felt necessary to divulge to me, that prevented quick access by anyone who wasn’t hilariously funny. Ie: If you told a bad joke, the car tried to keep you in or tried to keep you out as punishment. I could continue describing the car’s many unique, probably not OEM features, but I think you get the point. My car was a… unique but not in a cool way kind of car. And to meet Uncomfortably Gorgeous, there simply was no way that I could be dressed my best and climb out of my own car window upon arrival at the meeting establishment. I am unafraid of the silly and stupid, but some things just necessitate working car doors. One of those things is meeting Uncomfortably Gorgeous.
A couple of weeks actually went by and we spoke a bit, but not a lot, and I had the feeling that Uncomfortably Gorgeous was not the kind of guy that has to wait around for companionship to come his way and that Unreasonably Beautiful probably met him for a beer and opened her car door to get out when she got there to boot. A bummer for me, sure, but not an unexpected one.
But then… it was a Friday night. As I mentioned earlier, such occurrences were most ideally spent in my rocker, blah-blah-blah, but on this particular Friday, there had gathered a group of people at my house, which was not unusual, for I had opted for a pool table in lieu of living room furniture, which sat before a television of Stupid Enormity on which I displayed… You guessed it… Hockey games. Those things alone can draw a friend or two, but together, really draws in a crowd. And crowd it indeed was. But my friends were not… How should we say… The most… Normal? Aligned well with their own intelligence? Well-suited for unsupervised anything? Who knows how to word that, but things were getting rather odd, and like a little beacon of normalcy and uncomfortable attractiveness, Uncomfortably Gorgeous hit me up a little out of the blue, asked me to come over to his house, and drippy-feet-be-darned, I beelined it for his house.
That was the sixth of August. I will spare the details of this part of the story, not because they are uninteresting or irrelevant, but because to me, they are sacred and belong only to Uncomfortably Gorgeous and myself. However, by the ninth of August, I was the newest resident of the Uncomfortably Gorgeous residence. And it wasn’t even my idea.
I moved in with him before we went on our first real date. What a couple of intrinsic idiots, am I right? That’s just bonkers. And… we were sharing a bed… Unwed! <Gasp!>
But when I was with Uncomfortably Gorgeous, simply seated by his side near his little garden in the backyard, or late at night near the small bonfire, my head on his chest and his hand wrapped around mine, or sleeping, entangled with him despite it being much too hot for such things… It was right. I felt safe, I felt appreciated, understood, cared about, thought about… I felt engaged and interested, my dark, dry humor finally matched with someone who wasn’t Carly… I felt important, wanted, respected…
Uncomfortably Gorgeous very quickly showed some less than stellar or ideal traits… Most notably, his enormous green eye. However at that time, when it got too large and began to feel as if it was encroaching on my Muchness, I would tell him so. I would have a genuine, distraction-free, face-to-face, productive and caring dialogue and set things back into proper place. When the situation called for an apology, I got one. A genuine one. One that everything else got put on hold for, one that was made with eye contact, validated by a really good hug and in the more extreme cases, even a bouquet of flowers (a first life for me!) or a kind gesture like cooking my favorite meal for me or taking me out for dinner.
Our conversations mattered. My texts were answered. My concerns were addressed. My opinion was asked for and valued. Time wasn’t just offered, it was dedicated in abundance. I was complimented. It was clear when my actions were appreciated. When I was gone, I was missed and I was told so in a loving way. My wants seemed magically to come true.
The bible on the headboard got opened regularly. Meaningful debates and conversations followed it being read to one another, often late into the night.
I told my people - friends and family - with conviction and real happiness that I had found my person. The person who’s hand mine fit into perfectly. The person who I could of course, live without – but that I absolutely did not want to – I’d found the missing piece of my puzzle and the piece that was meant to turn an oddly shaped past into… Dare I say it? … A family?
I saw a future for us. With my kids together and with a solid bonus parent to look out for them and be weird people with … I saw it all. I saw a ring on my finger and my last name matching his. So did he. How on earth?! It was baffling how absolutely perfect it was.
Sometimes, perhaps even oftentimes, if you have something you consider beautiful or valuable, and it has an imperfection, like a crack, it can really lend to the beauty you see in it, or it’s actually more valuable to you because it’s flawed - and you can conceptualize yourself that way. Broken crayons still color and a broken watch is right twice a day, after all.
But other times, something beautiful or valuable can sustain a crack and instead of seeing that it’s still beautiful or valuable, it loses its aesthetic… Maybe not right away, but overtime, little by little.
When you find the beauty in the flaw, you actually do something monumental. You intangibly fill the crack in with a bonding agent, of sorts. It’s actually stronger at the break than it ever was before, because the bonding agent is really powerful stuff. But an added bonus, nothing can work it’s way inside now. The bonding agent sealed it up and made it watertight again. Voila! Improved, impervious and beautiful. Win-win.
When you choose not to mend the break, it’s got a really vulnerable spot… It’s really likely to keep breaking more and more apart. And when the rain inevitably comes, it will seep into the crack. It will warp, soften, and eventually start to rot away if it’s left that way.
Uncomfortably Gorgeous is flawed. If I’m really, really honest, after seeing him, the entirety of him, I quickly learned that there’s a nearly equal proportion of Uncomfortably Unattractive to him. The same is true for me, probably true for you, your mother, her mother and her best friend’s dog groomer’s second cousin’s favorite nephew. I’m not picking on him. I’m actually pointing out how I figured out that for the first time in my life, I genuinely loved someone (my kids are the exception, different kinds of love).
His gorgeous parts, I stand before you and proclaim, friends, are gorgeous. As I may have mentioned, Uncomfortably so. He’s handsome to the point it hurts to look at him sometimes. His smile is luminous. Seeing it when it’s genuine is nothing short of miraculous in it’s ability to envelope you in an indescribable but wonderful feeling of warmth. His voice is as magic as the hidden orchestra in the frogs of a creek bed in the middle of a summer night under bright stars. In his eyes you can see fierce and unyielding passion and simultaneously see incredible kindness and compassion. He makes really great pickles and his Pad Thai is the best I’ve ever had made by a white guy from LA. His intelligence is a gift that is it’s own creature to behold and admire. I’m telling you, boys and girls, Uncomfortably Gorgeous.
What is the juxtaposition of gorgeous? Horrendous? That sounds about right. Despite being rather justified if I did so, I won’t disrespect him by defining the soft white underbelly. I’ve gone to great length to paint a vivid picture of what makes him so beautiful. And only a small fraction of it, really. So I’m certain that an intelligent being such as yourself can color inside the lines and imagine well enough what the flip side of that coin contains.
Once both of those sides of him were clearly visible to me, I realized that without one, there couldn’t be the other. They were both apart of him, however unsightly some of it was. I love(d) the entirety of the creation. If I only fancied his Uncomfortable Gorgeousness, that would be the thing farthest removed from real love. It would be something like lust, admiration, nothing more than a meaningless crush. Because I saw what makes him whole, I knew that what I felt for him was the real deal.
But I could also see that some of his cracks needed that bonding agent. They were already beyond small, superficial imperfections. They went pretty deep into him, beyond the surface and teetered on the edge of touching his Muchness.
So I told him. I told him about his cracks. Not maliciously. With love. And do you want to know what happened?
Instead of seeing what it was I was trying to do for exactly what it was, his attachment to his ego, his pride, and all of the nasty things that had started to infect the cracked spaces reached out from in him and metaphorically struck me, to form a new crack. Right down my front and center. Plain as day. For all to see.
The crack he made is deep. It is very painful. It’s damaged heavily things like my self-worth, confidence and sense of significance. Everyone around me can see it. And I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.
BUT…
As with all of my flaws, I’m slowly but surely filling it in with that bonding agent. It will take awhile. The crack he made is nowhere close to the only one I have. And I did a darn good job at pretending they didn’t exist for a really long time. So some of them need a lot of mending. But that’s quite alright. There is no end to the bonding agent. It’ll never run out. And the more I use it, the stronger it works.
What hurts way more than the crack he made in me is that he won’t acknowledge his own or allow the bonding agent to begin to mend him. Without it, he’s going to weaken beyond repair… And more than anything in the world, (my kids excluded, of course) I want him to be whole, healthy, and happy. Regardless of what that means for me.
But he needs the bonding agent to do it. And he’s shutting out the very thought that he needs it. His cup is full of old mayonnaise and gym socks, metaphorically speaking… I think.
So do you know what the glue is? The bonding agent? My dear brother, my lovely sister, it’s God. The only thing that can help him is the one thing he refuses to admit he needs.
Before we met, he went to bible college and did incredible mission work abroad… He single handedly ran a youth ministry in a challenging part of L.A. among other great things.
Before we met, I identified as a Neo-Buddho-Pagan.
How cruel this feels for the dirty little heathen to see the NEED for God right now, and to clearly recognize it as the only salvation for the man I love so much… But that he can’t see it himself?
Thanks for reading.
Love & Respect,
F
) My name is Faeryn and I have a hockey problem.