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I finally heard Chet Baker's mellow version of "Let's Get Lost," the main reason Scott assented to my suggestion of the name for our site. If it has a jazz component, scott's likely to dig it. I tackled Scott on the bed with tears and laughter as I heard it. Let's Get Lost. I kept thinking about that phrase the other morning when I should've been sleeping. But I was taken with the strength and beauty of our relationship since we've been out here. I felt my leg across Scott's shin, my arm stretched across his chest (nightly borrowing his warmth), and felt perfectly close to him but also separate and free. And I knew he felt the same. Before, we were "tied up and twisted," as Dave Mathews says, but in the painful way. In the suffering, choking way. Where the tightness and the tangled arms and legs lead to suffocation, panic, and a death of sorts. Here we're unwinding. We're finding out where we've gripped and tangled in the last 4 years, and we're letting go. We're seeing each other for the first time. We're DELIBERATELY communicating and constructing our new selves and our new self--our couple self. We're breathing life back into areas we thought were beyond nourishment. We're detangling. What we had built up in ignorance and in crisis was useful for us then, but it has hurt us both in ways we could not have seen before now. Scott's back has bowed with the burden, and my self couldn't exist without my own spine. So we've both suffered. And this whole time I thought my suffering was just RELIEVED by the sweet union. LIttle did i know then that our understandings of the relationship and the roles we filled helped CREATE all the problems we've been trying to fix. In the shower a week ago, I remembered myself as a girl. I remembered being quiet and peaceful and extremely self-reliant. I was the 5th of 6 children. I knew how to entertain myself. I had an elaborate internal world, complete with my own music and rhythms. and it continued. come marriage. In the shower I had a perfect mental image of me letting go of all that when i grabbed scott's hand. Of me opening up my hands and letting it sift out--the painting, the drawing, the writing, the singing, the creating, the being. Believing without seeing that somehow i wouldn't need that stuff anymore. So i let it go. And the crumbling began. And Scott, the perfect hero of his family, didn't need to learn to quiet himself and come to the rescue. And I didn't need any more instructions on how to learn to need him. And so we created our SELF. Unseeing. Until we were forced to either see it differently and with those same hands re-create it, or to give it up entirely. We're young and ignorant, but we're not stupid. We stuck with it. Besides, if there's anything we've learned in the last year or so, it's that worlds are to be created. Worlds can be created. We aren't victims of a crushing universe. Or a tangled union. So here we're getting lost--together. Unwinding mentally and tangling back up physically. Like God intended. And I've never loved him more and never seen him more completely. Of course, what saddles naturally up with that? Love for myself. And seeing myself and being myself again more completely. Like God Intended, ck [2002-11-22]
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