On Hope, and love.

It's been a while since I've committed what I feel to words for an audience larger than a person at a time. There was, as my last post indicated, a period of loneliness, and a determination not to settle for someone who didn't make me happy. I had, by August, decided to focus on my writing, and to focus on self improvement. When I went to GenCon last year, I decided to try to make a connection in the publishing industry. Instead, I fell in love. With a woman in the scifi/fantasy publishing industry. Who is local to me, that I met 5 hours from home at an RPG convention.

It has been 4 months and 18 days since our relationship moved from friendship to love. 5 months and 13 days since I knew that I would love her. Every day I am moved by how much more I do, as though my capability to love is proportionate to the passage of time. It fills me up, makes me smile at the most random times, gives me hope and a vision of the future. We have more in common than I have ever experienced in a relationship before, so much more that it seems surreal sometimes. I want to wake up every day for the rest of my life next to this woman. She loves me unconditionally. Loves my children. Encourages me, and lifts me up when I have bruised my ego so badly that I see nothing good about me. She wants to be a mother, wife, partner, lover, and best friend. She is at the center of my happiness, and I know more contentment and peace than I have ever known.

I've noticed something else. I am closer to loving myself than I have ever been.

It's as though, in her eyes (that I love to see full of laughter and smiling), I can see the me that is, as she sees me, and not the me that I've always presumed that other people saw. She gives me so much warmth, so much joy, so much light, so much faith, so much hope. I don't have to worry about what I'm not, who I should be, who I need to be, what other people want me to be. I'm just me, and she loves me for who I am. Not only does she love me, but she gently disassembles what insecurities and fears that I might have, with warmth and patience, and leaves me with no other choice but to see that I have nothing to be afraid of. I have a life to look forward to with her, and I plan to live it, to be who I am, growing, changing, and loving, knowing that this is who I'm supposed to be.

I still need to finish a written work. You can't publish love.