Thinking...

“If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus 1 day, so I never have to live without you.”-Winnie the Pooh

So I went shopping this past Saturday with my mom. No, not really the fun shopping that you plan ahead for and look forward to all week. The kind in which mother stomps into your room (after trying to compose a symphony by banging pots, pans, cabinets, and incorporating other elements such as yelling up the stairs and turning up the tennis match) at the butt crack of dawn (or perhaps a bit after) and announces more than asks that we are going shopping at leaving in 15 minutes. Do you want to come? Um, didn’t sound like I had a choice. But anyways, I was pretty much awake and she was going to this really neat and exorbitantly overpriced outdoor furnishings/gardening/decorating store to search for patio furniture for my sissypoo. Apparently they were having a sale. Whoa. They had some REALLY COOL, really overpriced stuff. But as we meandered through the sale tent (with some pretty reasonably priced items) and up the stairs to a house staged with their product, I found the most adorably sweet picture frame with the quote above written on it very largely. Like the frame was about 14 x 14 and made of rustic wood and held a tiny 5 x 7 picture in the center. I really want it.

Anyways, I absolutely love the above phrase (and of course, Winnie the Pooh), and it pretty much sums up my feelings towards all the special people in my life. Granted, I don’t necessarily want them to have to endure living without me (hehehee) but I especially don’t ever want to live without my love. Without the comfort of knowing that someone knows me. without the daily interactions. Without the parts of our relationship that are so comfortable, so routine, that if the routine were broken, everything would fall into shambles.

You know, it’s a fact that most elderly spouses die within 6 months - 1 year of each other. I look at them, at the lives they have built with each other, at the love they have cultivated and pruned over the decades, and I completely understand why they can’t live without each other. By that point in your relationship, the line that separates two people into separate entities is probably fuzzy at best, and more likely nonexistent. I bet they can’t even remember a time when they weren’t ‘they.’ I want that. I want to be that sweet elderly couple that I watch at breakfast places…you know, the ones that gaze into each other’s eyes, past the wrinkles, and are emphatically and helplessly in love. The kind where the wife cuts the husband’s food and he guides her as she walks. I want that. and I believe, with my whole heart, that it’s possible and I know that is what I have. And I wish that for everyone I love. And I’m so happy that I didn’t settle for anything less than the butterflies, than the fairytale.