Recursion Theories

I have not known how to talk about this really, so I haven’t said much on the subject for many reasons such as: I’m still working out my own feelings on the matter; and, it’s kind of weird. But anyway, here’s the thing: I’m dating my landlord. Okay, you say, fine. Maybe a little strange, especially if your current landlord is anything like your previous landlord. But no big. Here’s the part where I tell you that my landlord is actually the first person I ever dated. Chief Truthseer, subject of a long-ago interview and blog post.

Things have been a touch, well, mortal around here lately, which of course always performs that clichéd trick of making you feel your own mortality pressing up against your heart like a blood clot. And so CT and I went away for a couple of days. We spent almost all that time in bed. Some of it, in a cozy triple-spoon with his sweet and elderly Chesapeake Bay Retriever. There was a little fighting (we’ve both been stressed and worried for our various aggrieved loved ones) but it was productive in the sense that it led me to say the most embarrassingly romantic thing I’ve ever said aloud, which was, “We could really be in love. I could love you…if you’d just let me.”

Reader, is it not obvious? My years in romance publishing have paid off. Silly, teary proclamations aside, I think it suddenly occurred to us both that we were actually sorta in love and it was finally okay to admit it and act like it. Like I said, it’s not been something I’ve been talking much about…not even to him. I think that’s because what has been going on has a tinge of the unreal to it: that dream feeling—light as tissue—that if you concentrate too hard on something it will tear. In two months I’m moving to Utah. I’ll live there for four years. Because of his work, he can’t come with me. Is it foolish that I am looking forward to this as a challenge? Is it ridiculous to think we might be okay?

As I said to him in a letter once, in some ways he represents the last vestiges of the home of my youth. The last year CT and I dated was the year my parents got a divorce, the year I moved as far east as possible for college, the year I discovered booze and drugs and the random hookup. As much as my break-up with CT was influenced by these things, that year before we split, he was the part of my life that was sane and grounded and safe. And so I ran away from all that, into my wild years. Fuck you all, I thought. I will get along just fine without you. And I did. But I have to say, it’s nice to be back here. To rediscover his kindness and intelligence and how our similarities sometimes border on disturbing. He sometimes feels like my brother. He is, in a way—we grew up together. We grew each other up. In some ways I feel responsible for him. And he takes good care of me, so I know he feels the same.

In a short story, this would be the perfect ending: surprising but inevitable. But this is not a short story or even an ending. He is a complication, but this is nothing new. He has always been there, all these years, someone I had separated from but who never quite felt separate from me. Being with him feels like the completion of something, even as I get ready for yet another beginning.

I guess we’ll see how this goes. After all, there is nothing I like better than a nice, dirty complication.