Post# 5
NTOO-NOT THE ONLY ONE!
post# 5
The “Thing “- LDR…continue:
Howdy,
I know many of you, have been sitting on the edge of your seats, waiting to hear the follow up, of that magical first date. I’m going to try and hit some highlights of the next eleven months in this one post. I know!, we spent the entire last post on one day, and now we are going at light speed for the next eleven month in a single post. If you think that is because things cooled off or the fire began to flicker out, then you would be absolutely incorrect. As I sit hear looking back, my brain has been a little perplexed as to how it all actually happened and took place. I will stand by my earlier observation that God’s finger prints have been all over this relationship. Ok, so after that magical time on the 23rd of November, we both returned to our perspective corners, or parts of the planet. I remember my drive back to Va., nothing like a good road trip to get your mind to wonder in awe and excitement about what could be next. We picked up with our morning and evening conversations. I’ve never been a part of a Long Distance relationship before, at least not a successful one. It creates a longing and a wanting to connect and to be near that person, so you reach out in anyway that you can. We both sent each other chocolate candy, and one of us paid an exorbitant amount of money to make that happen, I will leave it up to your imagination as to who that was. I had the idea of sending her a little pink bear from build a bear, pink is her favorite color and yes, she is a girly girl. Well, somehow that whole delivery process went ary , we will blame that on covid as well, instead of throwing Build a Bear under the bus. And yes, there were definitely a couple deliveries of Roses. Here’s one for you, I mentioned earlier that we were both essential workers,,but I didn’t share what we both did. Let’s just say that Ms. Annomuis works in the health care profession. So I sent flowers to her job and while she was in a meeting, one of her underlings opened her flowers and read the card, placed them on her desk, and then delivered her the open card…rude right? If , I had only known in advance that was going to happen, I surely would have written something in the card to have made her bloush and her jaw drop to the ground. Ok, so we were already less than a month away from Christmas, and somehow we formulated the idea that we would celebrate Christmas in May together, somehow hoping that this Covid thing would have calmed down, but ” not so much”!. And so the planning began. We had a couple of bumps in the road, but I will cover that in the next post. Flowers after our first date, but of course, and then again for valentines day, which is a reach for me,,because I really don’t believe in celebrating Valentines day. It’s not that I don’t believe in celebrating love, because I definitely do, but I always thought of that day as for people who don’t take care of business the rest of the year . If you are showing love and appreciation the rest of the year, you don’t need to be exploited on the 14th of February. So while we have spent countless hours on the phone, thousands of text messages, and a few selfie exchanges, May was only going to be our only 2nd face to face. I know what some of you guys are thinking right now. November to May is six months, and I don’t know if I could that? , well me neither. This is a moment to take care of a little house keeping. This woman rekindle an old love of mine for R&B music, the age difference between us is only a couple years, but she severely impressed me with her knowledge of that segment of music, and she was no slouch when it came to Jazz as well. So we began to share songs with each other, almost every day as well. In addition to that, all of these words began to flow out of me. I don’t remember this having ever being a part of my life, probably since I was a teenager. When I got off work in the morning, I had these long flowing emotional text messages sitting in her in box. So when we hit our third bump in the road, this blog was born. And don’t feel as if you are missing out on anything, I will share about all three of our bumps in the road, because there are no perfect relationships, because there are no perfect people. Let me drag you back to the previous post about our aimlessly driving around as she shared that horrific story with me about her son, while he was out in California. Do you remember, what my thought process was as she was sharing that story with me. If you recall without looking back, then you get a gold star. My thought process was that she would be someone easy to fall in love with. I know! How does that happen with someone that you have only seen face to face , just once at this point. It’s not a magic formula,,first of all, I believe that loving someone is a choice,,way more than just the emotional giddy and butterflies, but that can certainly accompany and be a part of that choice. We will look at and cover that more down the road. For now, let’s plug in here and see how that happened. I’m not going to be prideful here, because it is not because of anything that I did, it just happened. Have you ever spent a certain amount of time with someone, and in a very short amount of time, you feel as if you have known them your whole life, and if not that, definitely alot longer than it has actually been. I remember it like it was yesterday. One morning, after crafting one of those heartfelt moving text messages, I realized that I loved this woman and that I would give anything or do anything to be with her. That morning I sent her an old school classic from the Spinners, “Could it be I’m falling in love “. I didn’t expect it , hadn’t planned on it, or even thought it possible with the distance thing going on. We share our little personal jokes, and have pet names, and amazing amount of support for one another in all aspects of our lives, ….so yeah, why shouldn’t we love each other? If you ask me we share more than people who see each other every day, and sometimes sleep in the same bed. Maybe it’s because of the distance that God glued us together in this unique way. I will be the first to tell you that I don’t know how people did it in times gone by. We are such an instantaneous culture, we don’t wait for anything, and Amazon has built a whole business around that, yeah prime!. Its not perfect and its not easy, but somehow it works. This is not a bump in the road, but one night while I was working, I was involved in a traffic accident, I was not hurt, but other people unfortunately were. Ms. Annomuis immediate reaction was I need to hop on a plane down there and take care of you. I only bring that up, to demonstrate that there are challenges in a LDR. All of us have had those days, when you just want to head home and fall into someone’s arms and be reassured that you are not alone and that things will be okay. For us that has looked like a lot of prayer. I don’t believe that either of us are naive or delusional, but we have opened minds and realize that there are extenuating circumstances that have to be resolved and the distance is just one of them. Ok, so now that you know how this blog was birth, let’s push forward to Christmas in May. So, the plan was for her to come to Va. She flew in on the Monday after mother’s day. I met her at the airport with flowers, balloons, and a huge sign with her name on it and welcome to Va. This was an underwhelming arrival because she was the last person off the plane, I was beginning to wonder if she was having cold feet, or flashbacks to when she was actually a flight attendant. We collected her bags and headed off to dinner, it was Mexican. I’m just going to be honest here and say after months of flirting over the phone, private little jokes, and a huge desire to recapture that first hug in providence R.I on another Monday. The first night will just be classified as much sexual tension and frustration, I don’t think either of us slept that night. And maybe that should have been expected. Ok,another cute side story for you, Ms. Annomuis is flying to VA. to hangout with a guy that she met online, only seen face to face once, and lives about 600 miles away. I know that people do this everyday, but we aren’t those kind of people, which either makes this really special or a little creepy, I’m going with the first one. So…just in case I did turn out to be some kind of axe murderer or cereal killer, she wanted to give her family some kind of way to track me down . Her oldest , who knew about her trip asked her ” Does Nana”? I think the comical part was that he wanted to know if his grandmother knew, as if she could somehow change the direction of the upcoming events, its still one of our private jokes to this very day. Ok, so after a night of no sleep, we got up and believe it or not we talked about us asking one another all night..are you still awake, for the fifteenth time…yes still up😀. We survived and got on with plans. At that time we were considering the possibility of her moving south, but that is not currently on the table now, but possibly some where down the road, you know how old people love Florida. We did alot of the tourist stuff, we had some great meals , she got to see alot of the area, we worship together, and almost as fast as she got here , the week was gone. I didn’t talk about alot of details of the trip, but for me it was a HUGE! win because it confirmed that we were actually a good match and that we weren’t caught up in some kind of affectation . Even before her plane touched down in Virginia, I can’t tell you how close we had become. The connection was and still is incredibly strong, I know married people who don’t share what we have, and possibly that is not a fair comparison, because when people don’t work on their relationships, they have a tendency to become stagnant and stale. She got on the plane to return home, and all I could think was , that, it wasn’t enough time. It did recharge us and bring us even closer together. On her return home, we picked up where we left off with the phone calls and text messages, but we also added a little face time from time to time. Our next planned get together was planned for September, that wasn’t originally the plan. We had plan to meet between our birthdays, hers in October and mine in the following month, but because of staffing issues at my job, it ended up in September. I flew up, if you know anything about me, that was a big ask, haven’t flown in years. Not afraid to fly, just not a big fan of TSA, sure let’s go with they are just trying to do thier job, just don’t get me started. September was fun, she had planned stuff for us to do, and I really didn’t care what we did, I just wanted us to be together. We did a little home improvement projects, the spring on the back door, went much better than the plumbing project, but it was all fun. We all know how those simple home projects always go according to plan..” not so much”😀. We went to the Vinyard and it was very nice, a couple of great meals, I tip my hat to the Seafood Shanty. The weather was absolutely beautiful, and as we drove around the shoreline, I see why people are drawn to New England. It was another really quick week and again found myself thinking that it wasn’t enough time together. Remember, I’m only glossing over a few of the highlights. Ok, Ms. Annomuis had escaped one crazy job, to find herself at another place that left her thinking…what the heck? Some of it, possibly much of it is do to extra demands that Covid has a brought to bear. I don’t know if I had any preconceived ideas about this Covid stuff, but the information has been all over the landscape, and I’m beginning to wonder if this is just going to be our new normal. Since she had switched jobs, we weren’t sure about her getting time off, so our next meet up was all on me. I decided to surprise her for her birthday. I flew into Providence and rented a car and drove up. Why Providence again? It was a non-stop at a time I could fly after getting off from work in the morning. We had another great interaction. She got to come home to a couple of dinners on table and laundry done. We went apple picking, which is apparently a big thing gaging by all the people doing it . We made a trip to the novelty store, which we had been joking about for a while. Let’s just say , that it was well worth it. We can’t do everything, which is unfortunate, because there was an opportunity to hear some live music, which is one of her happy places. It was a fun few days, which I will always cherish. So much so that I choose to forget about my return home flight being delayed three times. We got to visit a great a little church in Braintree,which is the next town over. Grace Church, great job, proclaiming the message. Again this is just few glossed over highlights , and by the sounds of it, you would think that we were on our way to living happily ever after, but the skeptic would say what about those bumps in the road you mentioned. They are coming. I just think that in this day and age with so many people, and so many dating apps, across so many states. It truly is like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. I don’t believe that either of us would have signed up for this, if someone had asked us if we wanted to do a LDR, but hear we find ourselves, and on some level it works, and God has knitted our hearts together across the miles. A little long, so until next time ✌
Sandy the Southerner
Sent from my T-Mobile 4G LTE Device
