Poetry, Part II

On Monday, July 30, 2007, I wrote the following:

"I've been thinking about women and poetry and romance. Some women just exude poetry. You see them and things start to rhyme.

"How do you become one of those women? No one will ever think of me as poetry; no one will ever write a song about me.

"I am not that gorgeous, I don't have a graceful or romantic air, and I don't move with the wind, dance with the breeze. I'm not very poetic. I'm not even prose. I'm the blurb on the back of a novel. I'm a movie summary. I'm the brown paper around a Starbucks cup.

"Why can't I be graceful, smooth, beautiful, mysterious, and demure?"

Now, it's important to note that only four months earlier, on March 04 of the same year, I had written a short blurb which was essentially the formal confession that I was giving up on a man with whom I was hopelessly in love. I knew then that he could never love the woman I was. In fact, I wrote this:

"My counselor asked me to think about the kind of person I'd want to see opposite me in a marriage.

"Tonight I met that person. Most girls end up marrying a man much like their father- not me. My dad is the polar opposite of what's attractive to me, personality-wise.

"I've known this guy for a while now. Tonight it was made obvious to me- THIS is the type of person I want to spend the rest of my life with.

"The problem is that he won't see me. I'll be a friend at best, and acquaintance more likely. But no matter my zeal for God or my sense of humor or my openness to conversation or my tendency to be REAL, I know the type of girl he'll go for.

"Sweet, more quiet. Not quite as versed in the Scriptures or in apologetics as he is, but devoted to God and with a blind faith that supercedes all intellect. And quietly pretty.

"I'm brusque, opinionated, educated, and probably someone who could challenge him in the deepest way. But banter is good when you don't have to live with the person. I can't change my personality so that this type of guy will see me. I'd be lying to him and, worse, to myself."

I ended that blog by lamenting that no one but God could love me. I didn't even like myself. And certainly no one else could love me.

But I'm with someone now (the same someone I gave up on back in March 2007) who makes me realize what bliss is. I never think of how he could be better to me. I never doubt that he has my best interest at heart. I never need to draw boundaries with him, because he seems to care enough never to get near the line.

He's not perfect. And neither am I. But he makes me laugh-- we laugh together so often that I imagine we'll be doing so for a long while.

I went through a phase after my last breakup where I didn't believe in fairy tales. I didn't believe in them because I thought they were a myth. I thought no one could ever love the way people in the stories do.

But as God healed my heart, I believed more than ever. I can have my Happy Ever After, and I will.

My K.i.S.A. makes me feel like a fairy tale princess. The way he looks at me. The poetry that escapes his lips. His occasional awe. I by no means feel that I deserve this kind of treatment, but now that I have experienced it, I can never go back.

I lamented in March of 2008 that I was feeling unappreciated... or at least that I didn't feel the fireworks that I thought I should at the beginning of a new relationship. Now, there are fireworks. That jittery feeling in my stomach that I didn't have before is there now. And while there has been no writing across the sky, there may as well have been.

And my K.i.S.A. even said back in March 2008 that he wants always to be a romantic idealist. I never thought that I would be the object of that very idealism.

I'm just a regular girl living out the life God set before me.

But he makes me feel like poetry.