every relationship has been a certain amount of falling from grace I never belonged there to begin with.

Just waiting for sobriety to spin away like a wicked dancer, even though I need that core for commitments I've made - to the world, but commitments to the world that relate more to myself than how I spend forty hours per week.

Just sitting in the oil-film over my skin that seeps into my eyes and stimulates the body to think they're tears. Makes my body temperature rise and my soul settle in a false sense of heavy acquiescence. All is not well. This is the thing, in being committed to someone. The lows are eviscerating. Excavating. And they've never been really, fundamentally worth it. They've never made me feel this need to shift everything, shift my thinking, my habits of mind my thought process to work, to wrap around a concept of two. Of harmony, in two as one. My thinking is shifting, because I am allowing it to. I've never been ready. I wasn't when this started, but I knew this one was worth making myself ready. I'll spend longer than he likes, becoming ready. My best is held back by the demands on our time, and more so by my own ignorance. But it wants. It wants to surpass the expectations. It's learning how.

This isn't the only time I've ever said to myself "I've never felt like this" - because every experience is new, every interaction, everything I allow myself to feel, every place I allow myself to go, is new. But this isn't just new. It's the deeply imbedded past, too.

It is hallowed ground.

And even while every relationship has been a certain amount of falling from grace I never belonged there to begin with. And while the flowers at my tips in the height of springtime will wither and fall and die and never come back quite as beautiful as they were before blissful naivety was wiped away, while the branches that support them could rot and grey crumble wetly and die, the ones that support all kinds of even the best ideals and concepts about a being, even them - this all is not just a feeling I've never had before, an amazing experience because of its novelty. This is a life-long reality. And life-long is no small thing to commit. A moment of passion and excitement can sweep one of ones feet make one see the world of possibility more brightly than is real I'm well aware of that. Because I've experienced many. I've known the kind of person it makes sense to follow that wave with and the person that it does not. Very. Few. At the bottom of everything, you always know the truth. I am guilty of denying a lot of those. But I am in touch enough with my heart to know at bottom what commitment is the one of the most important to make and how much it is not a thing to be taken lightly. I have made stupid decisions, but I know that with the big ones stupidity and quixotism are not to be followed - if if quixotism is at times guided by soulful impulses.

It seems to be a fundamental affliction of the human condition that it is so easy to forget that a lifetime, is all we have. Who we choose to spend it with, as far as a human partner who we commit ourselves to, is, I would venture to say, the most important decision we could make, as people who only live on this Earth for such a very, very short time.