Just as long as I'm where you're at, I'm gonna have a real good view.

A couple of weeks ago, I was moving on with my life. 

Happily, carefully, trepidatiously (if excited), I had met a couple of new people and scheduled a couple of first dates.  Summer was unofficially here, and I took a couple of days to get away and see some friends.  While out of town, I was trying to catch a cab in the rain and decided to call another friend quickly. 

I stepped into the edge of the rain and hit her name in my contacts, hit her number and heard the first ring.  Shifting my purse in my hands, I glanced down at the phone and saw not that friend's name but a face smiling at me.

Bounder.

The phone rang again. 

I hit END as quickly as possible, and my heart started to pound in my chest. 

Maybe it didn't ring on his end.

It rang twice.  He heard it.

Maybe he won't notice.

Come on!  It's Bounder we're talking about.

I texted him and apologized if it rang through, explained that I was out of town and trying to catch a cab in the rain. 

Ten minutes later, he replied, Fate really is a bitch.

Turns out he was at home, phone in his pocket.  He hadn't heard it ring, though he certainly noticed the missed call and subsequent text.  It also turns out that he was reading Muchness and Light, catching up on what he'd missed in the weeks since he'd seen and talked to me. 

An hour-long telephone conversation in the rain outside the venue led to his coming to see me the next night, after I returned home.  What was exchanged between us is ours, especially his, but suffice it to say that the conversation was intense.  So much so that we agreed to try this again, to not let the fear of emotion and connection and unplanned upheaval keep us from being together. 

With all of our problems and issues and concerns, there is this force that not only keeps pushing us together, but keeps reminding us that we are supposed to be together.  If I doubt for a moment—usually because I am overwhelmed by the fact that this amazing man loves me so intensely and that I love him back just as much—I get some reminder, some prodding of song or feeling or intimate memory, and he usually somehow gets it, too.  There's almost always an immediate text or call from the other.  We are very much in sync. 

And the thing is, I was done.  I was finished with the trying and the crying and the hoping that he would accept how very much we meant.  It was never a matter of his not seeing it; it was all about his being ready for it.  I was over keeping myself from calling or texting, somehow able to talk myself down and not react immediately to the emotion of missing him.  I had stopped waiting for his attention and fully expected that I would never see or talk to him again.

The hardest part was always knowing that I would likely never find that connection with another lover.  Not like that.  My time with him—those incredible moments of just the two of us—had altered my desires and expectations on so many levels.  I honestly didn't think I would ever be able to find it that good again, and I really don't just mean the sex.  And the reasons we were apart seemed ludicrously unnecessary.

As with every bigger picture, there were other, hidden reasons we needed that time out of each other's immediate orbit.  I knew he had things to work out and work through.  What I couldn't see at the time were the remaining lessons I had to learn before we could ever move forward.  Even when I did that work, I had no inkling that the process was making room for Bounder. 

Every day, I get some reminder from the outside, some little push or sign from the universe or Fate or my subconscious or his, that this is when and where we are supposed to be.  We are supposed to be here now.

Because I lost him once and have been given this second opportunity to be wholly with him, I refuse to waste it.  I am cognizant of our separate and collective pasts, cautiously aware of how close we came to not having each other.  I am thankful and grateful that I've been given the chance to be both truly myself and to be what he needs and wants, but also to have him reciprocate in all of that in a more honest way than any other has ever offered to me.  He is a remarkable man, and we are incredibly lucky to have this time.

So I'm still moving forward, just not in the way I expected three weeks ago.  It is truly better than I could've hoped or wished, and it is happier and healthier than it would've been three months ago.  I have more lessons to learn, more work to do in preparation for whatever path my journey takes from this point.  But now my lessons and my work take on a whole new dimension by accepting Bounder into my life.  It's not just what I get from this; it's what we get separately and collectively as we step onto this path together and head toward whatever is on that brilliant, shining horizon.