Sunday 14 April 2013

Just start from here... In your own words, no hurry. When you're ready? Okay?



Well, yes, where do I start?
I really have forgotten how to do all this stuff with keyboards and so on. I've been away. Away from the world, away in another place, but not a place you can find on the map, I've been away in a metaphysical sense as well as a geographical translocation.
I've been travelling with the Red Dirt Girl.
Those of my readers who have a history here will know some of our back-story, but it deserves a re-telling. It extends back to just a little before page one of my blog, back at the end of December, 2006.
I'd been blogsurfing, found a writer who'd posted a poem which I liked, wandered into the previous posts, had a fun hour or so of reading, looking at pictures, fascinating diversions. So I left a comment. Only the blog didn't accept anonymous comments, nor, so far as I then understood it, comments from anybody without a Blogger i.d.
What to do? I want to leave a comment to say how neat the blog is, so, I sign up, get a blogger i.d. and leave my comment. Only now I have a blogger account and no idea what that means, nor what to do with it, so I indulge my inner idiot, and invent a blog name and write something, and suddenly we're careering toward the trees with no stabiliser wheels and no brakes. I'm sure the occupants of the interwebs, those folk who were here first, before me, the big kids.... yes, just like that, like your first day at a new school. They're going to stomp on my lunch, ridicule my speech, flush my head down the toilet. But no. they were kind and welcoming, and its now well  over six years, and that blogger whose blog I liked, well, she responded, and we started a dialogue, and about seven months later, she stepped off a plane, thousands of miles from home and gave me a big hug.

I can't imagine really how much courage it took to do that, especially when her dad was warning her what a crazy person she was, going to meet some unknown foreign guy, far away from all that was safe, he was probably a weirdo and a serial killer.

But she did. She made that leap of faith, and, as luck would have it, I may be weird, but I'm no cereal killer. Except for corn-flakes. We'd learned a lot about each other, of course, by then, but even so, it was nerve wracking. After about three days I told her that I planned to marry her. I didn't exactly ask, I just told her. We were sitting in York Minster, in a beam of coloured light from ancient stained-glass windows. She didn't scream. Nor did she run away.

A little later, I persuaded her to sit on the pedestal of a roman column, for a photograph, she was not too sure, thought the romans might arrest her, for despoiling an ancient monument. That's what happens when you grow up in a world where a building from the 1960s is regarded as 'Historic'.

 I think she looks happy?
Here we are, six years later, and we're still both happy.  And I'm packing up my life, ready to move to the U.S. to marry her. 
There's a ring, made specially for her finger, by a craftsman working in a tiny village where there are remains of Roman villas, some 20 miles north of where that picture was taken. And there's a heap of paperwork, grinding slow as a glacier, through the machinery of government, but one day soon, I'll get the piece of paper summoning me to the embassy in London for a 'Fiance Visa' interview.
Once my passport is stamped, I'll be winging my way west to a new life, with the person I should have met twenty years ago.

As I say, I've been travelling. With my best friend, my missing piece, the one who says the word I'm thinking. We're not clones, we're very different, but we fit. We fit like matched gears, like jigsaw pieces, like beats of a heart.
At the moment, we're apart. We speak every day, the phone companies  should love us, but instead just overcharge us with glee. Thank heavens for skype.

Sometimes the internet does good. I wasn't looking for this, I'd no idea this would be the result of one little comment, but I'm very happy it did.

Happy Birthday, Red Dirt Girl!

(More travelling, and pictures to come)

7 comments:

  1. OHHH WOW! I wasn't expecting this. You've made two women cry (me and the mulette). This is so so ... lovely. I'm 'whelmed. Oh the tears are happy tears, very very happy tears. I was told from the start that the internet was a dangerous and scary place. Sometimes you have to throw caution to the wind as we say and take a chance. I did. I do. I will. For life.

    The rewards are huge. I've met the love of my life. My soulmate. And you are always surprising me. Like this! We are almost there. I can't wait for the next chapter to start with you.

    I love you.
    And that's the best birthday gift ever - loving you for the rest of our lives.
    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx!

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  2. The need to talk to her, knowing the phone company is gouging you but not caring because as long as your money gets you to her it does not matter, that's love. It's wonderful when it hits. I wish the best of everything to both of you.

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  3. As one who got to watch those first comments between you guys, lets just say this is no big surprise. Ya'll hit it off from the get-go!

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  4. I think it's wonderful that you two met up...somethings are just meant to be...some people are meant to meet and to be together. It matters not how they initially connected. Good on the both of you!

    This makes me feel happy. :)

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  5. I'm in tears here!
    You should have met 20 years ago.

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  6. Lovely, truly lovely.

    I wish you all the best!

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  7. Thank you all.
    I'm usually fairly reticent about my 'real-life' thoughts and feelings. I'm the person who likes to sit in a shadowy corner, observing, I've weathered many a party by hiding out in the kitchen, I prefer quiet conversation to loud music.

    I live in fear that my real-life friends and colleagues will find my blog... (If you are one, then I'll thank you for never revealing to me that you read this). My work colleagues consider my habit of reading books to be strange, weird, and a sign of deviancy. Not watching sports, not knowing the names of people on t.v., not having a television, these mark me out as ...well, strange. Strange is a less derogatory term than some I've heard...

    So this, this post. Recent posts, well I guess I'm well and truly 'outed'?

    The Red Dirt Girl, well, she believes in destiny, I believe in randomness, but whatever the mechanism that brought us together, I'm grateful for it.


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