Jillian Rue

Last night I crawled into bed with 2H and his arms scooped me up and pulled me closer to him. It was late, he’d been in the city all day doing the important things that he does. He didn’t get home until 9pm and we were chatting over his late dinner.

“It will be 2 years in October,” he says to me.

I stop for a moment and think. He moved out of his house last October and we met up again for the second time the October before that. Two years in the blink of an eye, but my God some of those moments/days/weeks have been so long. I think of this conversation as he is pulling me closer to him. The heat of our bodies adding to the already sweltering 84 degrees in the room he rents for us to be together. The AC is out, but even in the unbearable heat, I am comforted by the touch of him.

We make love and start to drift off to sleep.

“Loving you have been the easiest thing I’ve ever done” I whisper to him as his body begins to twitch signaling his surrendering to sleep.

“And the hardest,” he whispers back.

“Oh no, loving you has always been so easy. Our situations have been desperately hard, but you are so easy to love.”

He nuzzles my neck in agreement and the big twitches come. The ones that mean my whispers will go unanswered and my mind drifts back to two years ago, when we met again.

I’d just gone through the most painful loss. E. Meyer. The great mind fuck of my life. At 26 years my senior, and having previously been my Pastor, E. Meyer should have never been my lover. But he was. And I suspect like me, untangling the complexity of our love that I can say without a shadow of a doubt was the most difficult love of my life, will take beyond my last breathe. It was a love that was never supposed to be what it was, and neither of us listened.

I closed my eyes and thanked God that I didn’t end up with E. Meyer the way I thought I really wanted those years ago. My mind was a mess, and my heart even more. Here in the arms of 2H, I was sober, safe and happy-things I thought were never meant for someone like me.