I’m Engaged to the Girl Who Travels

I’m engaged to the Girl Who Travels. We met somewhere out there. We haven’t seen each other for spans of up to months. It’s been heartbreaking every single time we leave, she leaves, or I leave. We dated for years, engaged for years, and we’ll be married for years once we figure out when and how to get married. Maybe more importantly we need to figure out where to get married.

She took this photo of a happy day at the Dali Museum. Normally it would be deleted, but there’s a beauty in this kind of oft-deleted photo. Reminds me she’s behind the camera.

I’m not sure where she fell in love with me. But I fell in love with her in a hill-top town in France, in an Italian trattoria in Cagliari, on a 2 and a half hour train ride from Barcelona to a Dali museum and a sleep ride back, swimming a deserted Caribbean beach, while eating Jamaican patties on the side of the road, while skyping from a cafe in St. Martin, and it goes on and on that I fall in love with her every single day. While star-gazing one night I fell in love again. I spent more time looking at her than I did the stars, I’m sure she noticed.

A night sky at sea is a beautiful thing to behold, especially if you’re holding the one you love.

Even though I’ve traveled and lived abroad at times, she’s done it more. A year in England, months in Canada, weeks in Australia. I’ll never win a battle of been there, done that. But that’s fine by me. I’ll always be a 2nd place to her winning smile. I can’t wait until the day I have known her more than not known her in my life. That truly is when I will grow up. It comes to a point every few weeks when I need to tell her I can’t do this anymore that I want to be with her all the time and I will do anything to do that but we are on different paths at the moment. In a few years this will only be a moment. Now it seems like eternity.

We both travel, we both move about. She there, me here. The next month she’s there but I’m way over there. I’m trying to keep still, create a sort of landing runway for her, and me, us.

Now it’s my time to be here, for as long as possible. She will find me. My coordinates just need to stay still for long enough to build a home for her to return to. It’s not easy if we both travel. It’ll never be easy. A future garden might have it’s paths named after Greek streets and English avenues. Our walls covered in maps instead of family pictures.

longitude and latitude don’t matter so much anymore. We’re always moving.

Once we met at my cousin’s house in South Florida for a BBQ for 2 hours. A week together in the Caribbean, her at work. Once we met in Yokohama for a couple weeks. There will be those times again. I’ll never forget them. She’ll never forget them. The stuff stories are made of.

It’s a moment of my soul waking up, when I see her after so long. It never gets old. She’s a new person every time. I’m a new person every time. Our commute is not an hour each way, it’s a couple days.

A lonely ship at sea, so far from shore, another ship, another thing.

A ship at sea seems so lonely from far away.

We won’t settle down until this is out of our system. In fact I lie, there is no settle down. Settling down means we’re dead in the ground. I think we’ll travel to our hearts content. No matter when, no matter how, no matter where.

Valentine’s day doesn’t happen once a year. We celebrate our life together, apart, every single day.

Don’t date the girl who travels. Marry her.