Gourmet mocha
Going home from work, I, most of the time, find him on the couch reading a newspaper, it’s his habit, and sometimes it does annoy me. He has to read the paper cover to cover everyday, even if it is already seven in the evening and the news for that day has already gone stale. He talks to me about the news and challenges me into an open political debate, much like the debate we go over about trivial stupid things.
Driven by a temper that surprisingly comprises his charm, he argues with me as if I will ever just concede. Until I hoist him back into a saddle that calms him down, with a shout or with a hug and sometimes with a flick on the forehead.
Even if we are both unyielding on issues such as integrity or love of life or devotion or adventure, we still find it an effort to agree on levels, intensity… even semantics. He’s extremely opinionated, always with a stubborn look and definitely has two hundred years worth of training to go before he achieves my level of diplomacy. On normal life bluntness and stubbornness, I also take the lead. He is able to tone my being-too-much-of-me down with so much patience and an unconditional show of love so that often he catches me off guard with a comment that would suddenly make me gasp or laugh or shut up. He unconsciously taught me to equate my pride now to nothing but foolishness when it comes to love. This lesson came from a trust and a respect of such proportions that I never had for a man before.
I came from past relationships where I have been told that when things are just right, things are okay. When there are no mysteries that can probably remain unearthed eternally or borders to cross or issues to wrestle over, then you have found the one. Unfortunately, exact is a very tricky word, as is forever. Work and candor and scars, are pretty words though. None of them is magical, true, but it’s their actuality that makes each interesting, a freedom of presumption that induces respect and reverence unto itself.
The love that difference or likeness brings is irrelevant. It is what makes us grow each day morphing into better people that matters. Besides, it is only through those difficulties, those little mundane differences that you are able to open your eyes to another way of experiencing life. Even puzzles must be differing blocks before they fit to make a picture.
Walking down cobbled stiletto-trap streets this new year, waiting for midnight to become more than midnight and become our next year together, we become poster children for reality’s little surprises. It’s not the color of our skins, or the similarity that the stars painted that brought us together. It’s our devotion to happiness.
It’s only what we do from hereon that will make us who we are together, nothing else.
“Tolerance and celebration of individual differences is the fire that fuels lasting love - Tom Hannah
We believe in different things, always trying to find a compromise. Or a midpoint.
We believe in different things, always trying to find a compromise. Or a midpoint. Or a total agreement. But often, we end up discovering ourselves, and amusingly, together.
The differences between us are overwhelming, and it baffles even us, how we have never ever, willfully hurt each other. It’s inexplicable that despite having such strength of personality, he has no scarring pride when it comes to showing affection. He has never made me lose sleep on anything else but good pillow talk or a chance to catch me unaware, somehow. 
January 8th, 2006 at 6:15 am
I can’t say anything, that someone hasn’t already said before only better, so here is something that Rainer Maria Rilke said.
To love is good, too: love being difficult.
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.
With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.
But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is–solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.
Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate–?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
And all I can add to that and what you said is… Yes. Very much, yes.
January 8th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
That was beautiful, thanks for sharing that with me, ateh.
Its funny how we always want to take the easier path, trying to find the right one by matching our compatibilities with each other, when in fact,a person, although gradually, still definitely changes every minute of his life that passes.
Is it a fault to believe in working for real love?
January 13th, 2006 at 2:43 am
You got a great thing going there. I guess 99% of the population is jealous.
January 13th, 2006 at 4:23 am
I really hope this lasts for a long time.
I guess I’m sufficiently jaded now. Just the right amount to identify potential partners who: can promise you the moon, the stars and all those undeliverables, and yet cannot comprehend that something grand is composed of little noble things.
I’d hate to be the one to de-romaticize love stories, but I think the more you insist mysticism in something, the more you forget that in the end its all based on simple things— a one-word message, a post it note on the bathroom mirror, listening, a holding on, a holding back, an argument, a difference, or even the truth (everytime)— =)