Just A Few Words

I want to write a few words about the woman I love.  Quite honestly, a few words couldn’t possibly fill the bill, but neither would a million.  Where my Sihaya is concerned, I often find myself bouncing off the limits of the language.

I took her to the airport last Sunday morning at 4:30 am.  She had a flight to Hawaii, where she spent the next ten days with her family, and she will be home tomorrow.  Though the trip was planned before Sihaya and I met, her mother invited me along – a wonderful gesture – and if my daughters were with their mother, I would have gone.  

On Sunday morning, we sat in the terminal food court, her head nestled on my shoulder, and the conversation was as easy as if we’d known each other for three decades instead of three months.  After we parted, she to the security area and I to my car, she lasted five whole minutes before calling to say, without any artifice or agenda, that she missed me.  

Seriously, the words that flow so easily on abstract subjects…haven’t left me, it’s just that pulling them out is like pulling hen’s teeth.  All the eloquence has left me; her very existence is poetical, and nothing I can say can do justice to her.  

I could more easily describe the Mona Lisa, or synopsize the collected works of Shakespeare in twenty-five words or less.

And without warning, a song like KT Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See” comes on, and I’m free to write something nearly worthy of her.  

“…you can see she’s a beautiful girl
She’s a beautiful girl
Everything around her is a silver pool of light
People who surround her feel the benefit of it
It makes you calm
She holds you captivated in her palm

Suddenly I see
This is what I want to be…”

I first heard that song before Sihaya and I met, but this is the first time I’ve heard it since, and I think I get it now.  It’s the silver pool of light thing.  

Since the day she and I met, she has plainly shone with joy.  That first date, coffee at Starbucks in Fashion Valley, while we wandered around the mall, talking and gazing into windows, I remember commenting on her laugh.  I remember exactly where we were, outside the Bang and Olufsen store, I said simply, “I love that you laugh so much.”  She replied that she’d gone a long time without laughing and had only just recently found her capacity to laugh again, and she was making the best of its return.  

And then she walked into me, playfully, nudging me with her shoulder.  

I thought, Oh, so that’s how you are!  

She walked into me quite a few times that day, always playful, as if she was saying, Hey, this could be good, you and me. Let’s have fun!

This is good, her and me.  

I make it a point to tell her every day that she is amazing.  I never get tired of saying it, and no matter how many times I do, the meaning of the word doesn’t diminish a single jot.  It’s about the joy she finds in her dancing, in her friends, in the myriad aspects of her day, and – however inexplicably – in me.

Is it any wonder that she sees joy in my eyes?

Yep. I know. I seem to be using the word “joy” a great deal in this post.  I will not apologize.

We exchange e-mails throughout our day, share jokes and frustrations and triumphs.  We share each other’s thoughts, exist in each other’s thoughts.  When she gets home from dance class or rehearsal, she calls to say good night, and because we know how the day went, we’re free to talk about other things: her cats, the opera, my flight simulator projects, family, cookies, wine, farts, movies, hopes, dreams, history, current events.  In short, we can move past our day and on to Important Stuff, Getting To Know Each Other Stuff.  This is how we’ve become friends.

It’s no different on those nights when we can be together.  The weight of the day has been shared all along, and we can almost always let it all go in the first five minutes of each other’s company.  Once in a great while, it takes almost ten.

I must confess that the greatest joy I get from knowing her is the privilege of seeing her open herself to me.  This is the part of being in a relationship I had forgotten about, and I am captivated not only by the wonder of it, but also by the fearlessness she seems to have as our intimacy grows and our lives slowly intertwine.  

As fearless as she is, she is equally unhurried.  There is no stumbling, headlong rush, no breathlessly exaggerated proclamations in her approach to the process of becoming us.  It is, we are.  The most noticeable outward expression of the deepening commitment we share is the slowly increasing number of pages between where we are on the calendar and where our plans begin to be formed.

From time to time, she shows me a glimpse of the enormity of her soul, the vast depth of her character.  One of the challenges I face is in dealing with an inappropriate sense of my own unworthiness…in the face of all evidence to the contrary, I have long lived in fear that an annoying little dog might someday pull back the curtain and show me to the world as I feverishly work the controls of my illusions.  The only time I have ever seen Sihaya irritated with me happened when I deflected a compliment she paid me, and I realized that in refusing to accept her amazement and wonder at the discoveries she was and is making in me, I was withholding a part of the respect she deserves.  After all, how could it be possible for anyone to be simultaneously wonderful and incapable of experiencing genuine wonder herself?  Consciously, I began by simply thanking her for her praise, but as my awareness of her integrity has grown, I’ve also come to accept the basis for her admiration without any question, and feel that I am indeed worthy of such a woman.

And the most wonderful thing of all: she thinks I’m brilliant.