A Man Worth Writing For

Once, you asked me to never write about you again. 

I'm sorry, but that's the only promise I've made to you that I can't keep.

Our worlds collided on a sunny Monday morning in late March. I stepped onto the first city express bus, and when I looked up after dipping my ticket into the machine my heart jolted in its chest. You were sitting on the right-hand side of the bus, third seat to the back. 

It was too late to pretend I hadn't seen you, like I'd done a couple of times with other people I'd run into from high school over the years. No, your eyes and mine had already locked and there was no pretending that I didn't recognise you. So I put on my most nonchalant smile, walked as calmly down the aisle as I could and took the seat behind you. 

"Adam Ward." It was more of a statement than a greeting. You smiled back at me and I hid my hands under my thighs so you wouldn't see them trembling. See, I've never been good at the whole small talk thing. People think I am, and trust me, I put on the best possible act that I can in the moment but the truth is I have horrible social anxiety. Walking into a party full of people is my worst nightmare, so being trapped for an hour with the class smartass I wasn't friends with in school and hadn't seen for 12 years wasn't the most ideal Monday morning bus ride to work. 

But somewhere within that hour between Narrabeen and Wynyard I became enarmoured with the sound of your laugh and hungry to hear it again and again. No one else existed. When we reached our stop it was only then I realised the bus had slowly filled around us with businessmen and women.

Reluctantly, I said goodbye when it was time to go our separate ways but later was startled by the way my heart soared at receiving your first text message.

It was a strange mixture of feelings, those first couple of weeks. I felt like you knew me, like you saw past everything and straight into my soul but I couldn't separate this man I had met on the bus from the high school clown, and I was scared. I was scared to let go because too many years had been carefully spent healing and trying to toughen each layer upon layer and then you had just quietly appeared out of nowhere and I felt myself unfolding, dangerously.

Surely, surely it's all a trick. Why would you meet me for the second time on my birthday and take me out for lunch? Why would you meet me after work on a Friday, get me drunk, kiss me tenderly and walk away without the mention of sex? But finally, it was on Narrabeen beach on a starry Sunday night, staring at the night sky and wrapped up against your warm skin, I knew that this was a deep and true love. 

A maddening, sickening, free-falling sort of love that left my knees consistently weak and my eyes stained with the colour of roses. 

I couldn't be apart from you for a moment, so you never left my warm little studio on Ocean Street. My soul recognised you as its mate from another lifetime and nothing was going to tear us apart now that we'd found each other again.

So I guess then that the first fight was a shock. Your molten eyes became cold and hard. I was so desperate to bring that warmth back but so erratic in my own anger that our little love nest became a battlefield. I'd never experienced anything like this in any other relationship and the aftermath left me feeling devastated. So I did the only thing I knew best and I wrote about it. You read it, and I know it wounded you deeply. My sword had found its mark.
We were learning so much about each other in such a short amount of time that all the differences began surfacing and I was beginning to understand we were people of opposite minds. My head was a constant lecturer: it won't work, it kept insisting. But my heart... No, my soul continued to fight for you, to remind me that a love this great was worth the fall. 

Slowly, I began to understand your anger. It had planted its seed in you from an early age, eating dinner as a little boy while your father yelled at you for putting your elbows on the table. When he slammed the table with his fist unexpectedly. When he packed up and left your mother and your sister and you for his other family. When years later your heart was shattered into a thousand tiny pieces by your first love. 
I was seeing the bigger picture and understood the children inside ourselves had been bruised by our fathers and we needed to be sensitive with each other, to compromise and work together through the anger and the differences. 

And soon I began to see him; that little boy. He stole your face while you slept. He demanded pizza when you were sick with a stomach virus. Looking into your eyes, I tried searching for the angry man who months before we had met had head-butted one man in a fight and pulled a knife on another, but I couldn't see him. 
I knew he hadn't vanished, but he was just tucked away now, somewhere deep inside. In his place was; is the most incredible, beautiful, sweetest, strongest human being I have ever known. A man who makes me laugh every day, who makes me realise my potential as a woman and a man I know I will continue loving into my afterlife. 
And I'm not afraid anymore. I've stood naked before you with every layer unpeeled and every nerve, fibre and blood vessel exposed, and you have found me beautiful still. 
I know the path ahead together will be rocky at times, but I would take a million falls in life to wake up every morning next to you. You are worth the fight. You are worth the heartache that follows and the stinging, salty tears. Because I know that after all of that will be the endless windy kisses, the smiles brighter than fire, the laughter louder than thunder and the home I have been searching for my entire life and have finally found, in your arms.