I’ve been sitting here, for the past two days, stewing over the minutia of partnered communication. We’re still trying to sell my house, have found yet another property we’re interested in, and I find myself stuck in the “I’m willing to give so much but you’re giving nothing” mindset. Yesterday I actually had a mental list going. Not my proudest moment. This is not good. Now I’m easily peeved these days, and any aspect of Matt’s demeanor (body language, facial movements, exhalations for God’s sake) is fodder for my brain, which is already stoked with residual low self-esteem and general feelings of inadequacy. So I interpret every frown or deep breath as his super-secret-deep-dark-feeling-of-I-don’t-wanna-live-with-this crazy-bitch. It’s almost like, maybe, if I spend enough time trying to psychoanalyze the frequency of his eye blinks I won’t have to figure out what I think about our impending cohabitation. Um, yeah.
The funny thing is, in the middle of this general pissfest, I realized that this guy has loved me out of nothing. Okay, not nothing because I’m wonderful and beautiful and strong and all that shit. But he loved me out of my two-sizes-too-big jeans and out of the giant black hole I was in. One night when I inevitably began cooking dinner around the time it should have been on the table, I was rushing along peeling and chopping and measuring. I was getting a Russian Vegetable Soup facial as the steam enveloped us both, if only to remind us that we were all ravenous at 9 o’clock on a school night. One of us grabbed the canister of dill, and even though it looked off while I was measuring, I threw it in and stirred and stirred, happy with the addition and the prospect of dinner. Not long after, I spied many, many specks that were not dill. I fished a few out and confirmed my suspicions; there were bugs in my soup. For the next 30 minutes we stirred the succulent soup and picked. Stir, pick. Stir, pick. Stir, pick. You want to know what we did next? Probably not, but I’m going to tell you anyway. We ate it, steamy and delicious, with hot buttered biscuits and tall glasses of iced water. Matt and I glanced at each other (when we stopped to breathe), complicit in the decision to not tell C about the guests-who-shall-not-be-named who briefly resided in our soup.
So you all want to know what real love looks like? A man happily eating the bug soup.
from midnight oil 