PERFECT PLACES

Jonathan (7)

When I said that I wasn't needing to write here much anymore, that I might not need to come back for awhile, I don't think I realized how long I would actually be gone.

It's been a very long time. It feels like I've lived an entirely different life since being here last. I've become a different person.

It's been two months.

I started dating Jess a week and a half after the day I told her that I loved her and she told me that she loved me. I thought at the time it might have been the best day of my life, but so many like it have come and passed since then that I'm not sure anymore if I have yet to experience my best day with her or if that day has yet to come. I can imagine flying higher and higher with her as each day goes by, to new heights, to places I didn't even know existed. It doesn't feel like there is a plateau of happiness approaching in the near future. It feels like we will be able to grow taller and taller and never get used to it and never get bored of it and never resent it. It reminds me of a quote from one of my favourite songs.

'Love

it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you

it will set you free

be more like the man you were made to be'

I think when true love is really there, this is the absolute truth. The ridiculous feelings you have for the other person, they don't go to waste. They don't betray you, ever. You don't feel like you have to work your way through everything, it all comes naturally. Not only that, but everything becomes clearer, all of a sudden it all makes sense. They lift all the pressure off of you, bring you up to the surface, let you see life as you always wished you could. They are a new pair of glasses, they are the ointment to ease your pain, they are the wings that push you away from the ground that you never knew you could leave. I've been there, up in the clouds, for the past two and a half months. I almost forget what the ground feels like to be beneath my feet. The filthy, pathetic, self-pitying and lonely motions of those days on the ground, they're gone. I'm no longer human. I am an angel in the heavens.

When love is really there, as it is from me for her and from her for me, something else happens. This one is hard to adequately describe myself. I've always felt it, always wanted to say it somehow, but I never found the perfect words to say it myself. But there is another song, one from my days as a teenager, that contains those perfect words:

'You change all the lead

sleeping in my head

to gold'

My surroundings aren't the only thing that has changed. I have changed; the lead in my brain has transformed; the way my soul and my thoughts interact with the world is different. She has killed my demons. She has cured all the illnesses that resided in the darkest corners of my brain. She has turned me into something new: she has turned me into gold.

...

I wrote all of those things earlier, trying to put into words how and what I have become with Jess. But I didn't come back all of a sudden, after being away for all of October and November, just to say those things. I think there's something I need to talk about here. It isn't anything hugely important, it doesn't change all of those things I said before. My life is as good as I'm trying to say it is, and more. But there has to be a reason that I came back here because I feel like I have something to say again, something to pull out of my mind and leave here so that I don't have to think about it as much.

There are things about Jess and things about me that make us very different from one another. I don't see that as a bad thing: we aren't meant to be the exact same. We are meant to complement each other and challenge each other and keep each other interested. Of course there are many things that make us unique from one other. She likes journalism and I like psychology. She wants to get super involved in university clubs and I don't want to. She grew up in the country and I grew up in the city. Her favourite restaurant on campus is the thai food one and my favourite restaurant is the sub shop. She is more extroverted and I'm more introverted. She likes going out to clubs with her friends a few times each week and I don't like to go out late at night and get drunk, or at least I never do it. That last one is the one I think I came here to talk about.