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Location: Home.
Listening: "Little Plastic Castle" by Ani DiFranco.

Oy vevoy. This day. You don't know from days.

So Peter stayed up all night writing, which is my goal, really, as I want him to progress on his art. However, when, after catastrophically good sex (which I might describe one day, but I don't like seeing people weep, so hey...not arrogance, y'all, but truth), one's boy bails to write and then, when one wakes at 12:30 PM, announces that he's sleepy, one tends to get a little cranky. Especially when one has just gotten out of bed and is wide awake. We talked this through at length, which makes me think I'm turning into a yenta, but Christ, I have to make sure that what I want for him doesn't maintain my own depression. It's a delicate balance.

So we went to Limerick's, a local Irish pub, and discussed, at length, and largely in analogies, a metaphor he had used to describe his approach to things. We ended up arguing theology and whether or not God had created Eve in his image or only Adam. Typical Leigh and Peter fare. We play chess every night, we smoke like fiends, we speak in word problems...we spend the rest of the time smooching and designing matching coat of arms tattoos. See? Typical.

But he's asleep now, and I'm wide awake on a Sunday and drinking. Yip. So I called Danby, and we talked for a while. I called Austin, and left voice mail. I sat and stared at the computer screen and wondered what the hell I'm doing here.

See, I'm not supposed to be here, not this way. I'm supposed to be the wild girl who'll never settle down, who always wants just a little more, and, well, I don't. I'm happy. I'm satisfied. I want nothing, really, more. I am sated, in a way, and I feel very oddly in that position.

And so for you, I came across the tracks
Ten miles above the limit and with no seatbelt
And I'd do it again.

What happens when the wild girl is forced to admit that she's in love, bound inextricably by her heart and soul and skin and breath to another being who is finite and fallible and everything she swore she'd never bind herself to again? I'll tell you. She falls the fuck apart. She gets scared and paranoid and uneasy. She becomes her mother and belabors the minutest point, because her entire self is held in the balance of one subtlety versus another. She becomes everything she was always terrified of becoming. And she has to deal with that. She has to deal with her fears, her flaws, her shortcomings, and her pettiest concerns. She has to face the fact that she can no longer believe that she can walk away without being irrevocably damaged. She can no longer dismiss someone without a backward glance.

She could never dismiss him. Everything she built on will lays at this person's feet. She could draw a gun on him for that presumption--to be that beautiful, that self-aware--but when he did the same to her (as she would have expected him to do), she'd only love him more. Is that what love is, in the end? Two people in the perpetual John Woo double-draw scenario? And does anyone really believe that, in that moment, those two people couldn't move just slightly and fall into each other's arms? Hate and love, really, are simply semantic in their differences.

We are strange allies with warring hearts
What a wild-eyed beast you be
The space between...
The bullets in our firefight
Is where I'll be waiting for you.

Love breaks you down and compels you to recognize your own mortality. You do things you would never have done before. You have a blood grudge against some girl at a fourth-tier law school who threw herself at him when you weren't around (when before, you would have simply laughed her off). You feel trapped and forced to respond when numerous women in bars decide that he's their unfulfilled fantasy and they want to take him home to forget, for just a moment, their husbands and kids and self-limited existences. You actually fear these people and seek to eradicate them or to walk away to save yourself the pain. You make the hardest decision in your life--to stay--because you could walk away, but the repercussions would drive you into insanity or the priesthood (not that you equate the two, because you don't).

Because you love this person. To the fault of the world. Everything you know could fall away, and you'd still think of him.

Which brings me to marriage. Kenny and Jenn, beloved friends of ours, got married on March 2nd. The ceremony was, needless to say, beautiful and deeply emotional. Kenny cried during the vows, which set me off, although I'd been crying slightly since they walked down the aisle, together. I won't go into the details, as others have done so much better than I could, but I will say that I haven't cried that hard since the Over The Rhine concert. It touched me as few other weddings have (my friend Abby's being an exception), because it was so clear that Kenny and Jenn truly loved one another and truly appreciated what they were saying.

Speaking with Peter Friday night, I realized that, not long ago, I had said some things that I didn't really mean. I had had a nasty reaction to a conversation we had had involving the idea of marriage and I had attacked the religious aspect of marriage and the church itself. This bothered him greatly and, when he expressed it Friday, I felt deep shame and sadness that I had acted so thoughtlessly. I didn't want him to think that I believed what I had said in that moment of temper. It would involve delving into things that I have never really allowed myself to talk about since I was in high school, but it had to be done.

So, here I go.

First of all, I believe in marriage--very, very deeply. This may surprise a lot of people who know me, but I do. I always have. I believe that marriage is one of the most sanctified unions one can enter into. I believe that marriage vows are sacred and should be entered into only after the greatest effort at contemplation and appreciation of them. I don't believe in divorce--except, of course, in cases of abuse. I believe that, if you stand before an altar or any other setting you have created, and speak those vows, you are bound to stand by them for the rest of your life. Period. I am disgusted by the horribly casual way our modern society treats marriage, and I, personally, have always been hesitant to discuss it with anyone because so many people I've known have such a similar cavalier attitude.

I've been engaged once and proposed to about four times. I've only once said "yes", because only once have I ever felt that I could live up to the idea of being married to that person. It fell apart, as things do sometimes, but I knew it was for the best. I had doubts--and I knew that, if I had doubts, I had to get out. Marriage is not something you enter into with doubts, no matter what anyone tells you about "doubts being healthy". They are, but not when you're about to tell someone that you'll be by their side until death. I take that very seriously. If I ever marry, I will have no doubts.

I can be very, very hardcore when discussing marriage, which is why I don't do it often. I'm also not supposed to buy into the Christian concept of marriage, but I do. You can blame this on my childhood in the SBC or the romantic leanings of young girls that some of them cling to, but either way, I do. I believe that people can tell each other that they will love each other until death, no matter what, and care for each other and help each other and exist for each other--and mean it, and have it be true. I believe that that kind of love exists, still, in this day. I decided a long time ago that I would never marry until I had found it, which is why I've made a career out of telling people that I "don't believe in marriage". I don't--not the marriage that society defines for me. Not the temporary attachment that they portray as ultimately disposable. I'm, at heart, a pagan--I believe in the kind of marriage that lasts lifetimes, that neither death nor absence nor "shiny, pretty" can break. I believe in that which defies the infinite. In today's society, this makes me "naive". In today's society, this makes me a throwback. So be it. My parents have been married for over thirty years. My grandparents were married for over fifty years each. I don't do anything that serious halfway--if I ever bind myself to someone in that way, it'll be once, and for life. I know this as I know my own voice or my mother's step in any hallway in the world. I don't speak lightly of marriage, and there's a reason.

As for what I believe the roles are in marriage, that's more liberal. I believe that husband and wife have equal obligations to each other and equal roles in the home. They are there for each other, and no one else. They are there to support, comfort, love, and defend each other, despite what the rest of the world may think. They are there because they are the only ones who could serve that role for each other, in the end. They are there because they want to be and, sometimes, have to be. They work very, very hard at understanding, loving, and, sometimes, tolerating each other (because no one is perfect). They give until they can't give any more. They give because they choose to. They hold nothing back. They face the worst and hope for the best. When no one else in the world is there to understand, they are the ones who step out of the shadows and offer all of themselves. That is what love is--and that is what marriage, which is the ultimate expression of that love, should and can be.

A close friend of mine from high school is getting married soon, and I'm happy for her. She sent me pictures of the ring, and, while, I found it pretty and suitable for her at the time, I also knew that no ring would ever be that important to me. I remembered a conversation she and I once had, when we were in tenth grade, about engagement rings. She wanted a two carat diamond with a Tiffany setting (which, as far as I can tell from the photos, is exactly what she got, complete with a faerie-tale proposal, etc.). I wanted amber. She was aghast and informed me that "amber is a semi-precious stone". I informed her that amber has held everything from butterfly's wings to dinosaur bones and, to me, it was a better example of the eternal than a diamond. She shook her head and told me that I'd "always been eccentric". I quoted Vonnegut to her. She wrinkled her nose, told me once again that I was incorrigable, and went about getting ready for her date that night.

I've never cared about rings, I despise De Beers for what I see as their commodifying of a sanctified partnership ("two months salary" is pure bullshit, in my opinion). My engagement ring in my freshman year of college was his class ring, and I cherished that thing as if it was made of platinum. It's all about the symbolism. I've had friends in long engagements who have shelled out for the ring and the niceties, but who have realized, in the end, that "if they love you, they love you no matter what". Many of them, sadly, have had to let her keep the ring when they realized that she wanted the rock more than she wanted them.

Which brings me to the concept of living together. I've always preferred it, because, when you wake up next to that other person, you know that they're there because they want to be. There's nothing legal to hold them there. They're not there because they can't afford to leave. They're there because waking up next to you is their choice, and only their's. This has worked very well. I believe in it. I rail against the social forces that discount it as a "second-rate" relationship. I defy those who say that it is an excuse to stray without "punishment" and an echo of the "true commitment" of marriage. I have seen people who live together who have a deeper commitment than many married people I know have. It's the spirit, not the letter, of the law in these cases.

What I despise about marriage these days are the legal implications. The idea that you must sign a contract to be legally married. I have always believed in the "Natural Born Killers" concept of marriage: "As God in my world, I pronounce us man and wife". Not that I discount God--I adamently don't. But I believe that anyone who tells you that you need a church and a minister to be truly married is, flat out, lying. The pagan community has a ceremony that they call a "hand-fasting" (so-called because they actually bind your hands together) that involves having the couple take vows to love and serve one another for a year prior to full marriage, and that obligate them to return to the same place at the same time in exactly a year and a day and pronounce their decision to marry or not to those gathered. It's a very serious vow, and one which, sadly, not many can uphold. However, the marriages that result after hand-fastings have, in my experience, lasted longer than many of the others I've seen. Priest, rabbi, priestess, or minister...or just two people standing where they like and vowing to love each other as man and wife...I have equal faith in all of them. Marriage is a sacrament in many religions, yes, but what I meant when I railed stupidly at Peter, was that, holy representation or not, contract or not, it was really all about the people who took the vows in the first place. If they don't understand the gravity of what they're doing, it all means nothing. No white dress or diamond ring or lengthy ceremony can change that.

Marriage is not a panacea. It won't cure the insecurities and fears and anger you have inside if you haven't deal with that already. It won't calm a heart that isn't calm entering into it. It serves to reinforce a commitment that is already there. It is a public announcement and expression of a commitment that could not die anyway. It is, in my mind, a formality, but one which is welcomed and preferred, because it is a natural progession in the cycle of loving someone. It is blessed, but only because any love that strong is blessed already. It is not a goal, but a step in the lives of people who love each other. It is something that should never be taken lightly and something that should never be discounted. It is, really, just symbolic of another beginning in a cycle full of ends and beginnings. It is what it is--and I respect it more than I can express. And it terrifies me to think that I could ever be that vulnerable to anyone.

And if saying that compromises my image as a "counter-culture girl", so be it.

And people speak of my "image"
As if I come in two dimensions...
Quick, someone call the girl police
And file a report...