How we came to be engaged.

2002-07-01 - 6:04 a.m.

I'm thinking about the patio. I want to make a garden on it.

I'm also, inspired by Missus Manukenkun's post, going to let y'all know how Pookie and I decided to get hitched.

It's a long, boring story unless you were there, but that pretty much describes most stories about romance, no matter what the movies say.

As I may have inferred, Pookie and I met in February of 1999, through a guy who we both had been dating at the same time. Perhaps it was a brain aneurysm that led him to think introducing us was a good idea, but either way, we met, we both thought, "Ehn," shrugged, and promptly fell in love.

We managed to squeeze almost a year of dating bliss, or at least the melodrama, out of that inauspicious beginning, but he was too fresh out of a really bad period of his life, and I was seemingly trying to cultivate a really bad period in mine. We didn't know each others' rhythms, and somehow, in the weeks following New Years, 2000, we discovered we weren't quite happy.

Actually, The Magus got dumped, for the first time since Blind Merv dumped me, which doesn't really count because she's a girl and I had been planning on breaking up with her anyway, and that was -way- back in high school.

So, I, broken and hurting badly, had to try to put my life back together. There were a few bumps, a few bruises, but I eventually found a place of my own, re-adopted my childhood cat, embraced my new role as a supervisor at work, and trudged on.

Pookie received a shitload of money from somewhere, gave up drinking, took up dating, and suddenly became Mister Fantabulous. Or so it seemed.

I guess he was just as bad...his life was empty, bereft of what gave it meaning: me. Honest. Okay, maybe it's not politic of me to put it in those words, but it was the truth. Both of us were trying to make ourselves better, were improving in most areas, but found something was missing.

I wasn't interested in anyone else, and found myself comparing them to Pookie, and hating myself for it.

I had told Pookie, long before our break up, that I could not be friends with him. I could love him or hate him, no in betweens. He disregarded this, and made some efforts toward friendship. Some of them ending with my screaming hysterically, others ending with both of us feeling like shit.

He was going away to Toronto soon, and at the beginning of his last summer in Halifax, something changed. It was likely to pressure of knowing that there were just two months of having each other in our lives, a feeling that we had to get whatever it was in our systems out in the open.

He was house sitting, invited me over, we got wasted on wine and I watched him play with the house's dogs, and damn it, I fell in love again.

We slept together, but didn't have sex, and waking up with him next to me felt right. It was awkward as hell for breakfast, because we weren't supposed to be dating. We both had been trying to convince ourselves that that part of our lives was over, except our feelings didn't quite agree.

We weren't dating, were we? Or were we?

We were.

Slowly, carefully, we started to talk, to reacquaint ourselves with each other. We realised that it wasn't our relationship that had been wrong, it was -us-. Both of us were unused to trusting someone in that way, were unused to loving and being loved back. We'd taken some wrong steps, allowed ourselves to be mean to each other, because we -were- used to getting hurt, betrayed, misunderstood. But then, aren't we all?

The summer ticked away, but it got better as the days went by. We renegotiated our relationship, working from caution toward tenderness. It was comfortable, because of our past, but new, too, because we had both changed. I'd lived by myself for the first time in my life, and he was about to graduate, had accomplished something himself, was prepared to make another positive step...

So, maybe 4 weeks before he was to move to Toronto, we decided to go see a band that a friend of his knew. Their name was "Good Question," and basically is a duo. The singer, a short, thin, powerful and beautiful woman, was amazing, a voice that had Pookie and I both in tears.

The subject of a "commitment ceremony" or marriage had come up earlier that day, but the music, the atmosphere, the whole day inspired me to ask him if he would marry me, in the impossible future where his Master's degree was done, and we were still together, and I had spent a year without him.

And he said yes.

And so, I suppose, we're engaged. I wear a ring that he gave me that day, only taking it off to shower. He has a wolf necklace of mine that he wears.

It's been almost exactly three and a half years together, with bumps along the way (not that you folks'd know anything about that, seeing as how tight-lipped I am about relationship woes), but overall it's been a lot more good than bad.

Cheers,

The Magus

PS: No, we won't be getting married in Vegas.

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