Three Hours

On Mon.13th July, for a period of three hours, I experienced something I wouldn't want to, ever again - my Significant Other's whereabouts were unknown, and huge panic was caused when his boss called and alerted me. For three hours, people called each other, involving even relatives of his in Johannesburg. His boss and I kept in touch and updated each other. Someone drove to his house to look for him, someone followed his route to work to check if there'd been a car accident, people called police stations and I asked a colleague to call a hospital (because I was too emotional to talk) - everyone trying to figure out what could have happened, eliminating one possibility after the other.

As we hit the three-hour mark, a very supportive colleague advised me to go home, because I was so distraught, there was no way I was going to get any work done.

I'll skip to the happy ending, and then continue. As I was packing up to leave work, his boss called and said that the mystery had been solved - he'd been at a work-related seminar, which everyone had forgotten about!

For the rest of that day and night, I experienced a shakiness inside that felt like it would never go away. Being unapologetically sensitive and intense, I knew that the physical sensations were just part of the bigger picture. I knew that the experience had been life-altering, and that I'd crossed a bridge. I knew that I'd never be the same, and that only time would tell exactly how the course of my life would be altered by the experience. When my colleague had asked me, after the drama was over, what my greatest fear had been, I'd said that I'd thought he was dead. The intense feelings that I'd been dealing with, in those three hours, were all related to that underlying fear: everything I'd attempted, every new avenue I'd explored, had been aimed at finding SOME other explanation, but underneath it all was a sense of pending doom. People who know me well would call me an optimist, but what I actually do is stubbornly deny that the worst-case scenario exists, until I've exhausted all alternatives. Hence my track record of staying too long in a situation that has ceased to be viable.

The most profound awareness, that morning, faced with the harsh glare of mortality, was of seriously wasted opportunities: a union of compatible souls treated far too lightly; an uncanny, spiritual bond that sets this relationship apart from any other I've had in my life, dismissed as everyday, replaceable, not that special; a Yin-Yang reciprocity, so right, so exciting, even after six and a bit years, assumed into the daily blur, relegated to the banal, taken for granted.

I look around and see so many couples who are simply going through the motions. They celebrate one wedding anniversary after the other, often extravagantly, yet their everyday lives are monochromatic, monotonous, their conversations monosyllabic, perfunctory. In some cases there's infidelity, barely-concealed, secretly applauded by less daring acquiantances. The ultimate soul-destroyer. I see people who have settled for loveless unions for some crazy reason or other. I see people who would rather put up with all kinds of abuse than be alone. I see women stripped of their dignity, passively allowing their partners to privately and publicly humiliate them. I see people giving up their dreams, allowing their flames to be extinguished, all in the name of some kind of socially-acceptable union. People who choose not to shine, because that would make them stand out as different. People who live their lives at half-mast.

I love a man who makes my soul sing, who tells the world about my music and is the one person who constantly nudges me to pursue my dreams, never for one instant doubting me, even when I'm in the grip of that old, counter-productive, childhood-based, misplaced over-modesty, called Self-Doubt. I love a man who walks into a room and lights up my world, who gives me the courage to be myself, and who has walked a long, extraordinarily convoluted but intensely beautiful road with me.

I love a man without whom many things in life would lose their glow. I know that now. Without a doubt.

A good friend told me recently: When you find a fork in the road, take it.

I have found a fork in the road.