Green Lights All The Way Home

Sneaking up and overtaking me. Limbs entwined there are moments when I can't tell which arm is mine, if it's my heart beating so fast. He looked at me last night and said, do you want to take this to the next level, and I had no idea what he meant and the clarification made me weak and soft and safe and warm. "Like, be... like, a couple. Just you and me, together." And of course, of course, of course. And his arms encircling and a nervous joke and a blissful sigh, contentment. And 4:30 and I wonder if he had slept at all because when the alarm woke me his fingers were still running through my hair, tied up like concentric pretzels. This is so good. For this moment, I am very thankful.

In other news, Kristin and Leah let go of a charged hoseline Friday night under Sue's supervision. They were trying to fight a dumpster fire and I can't imagine that it was larger than an inch and three-quarters, which is the standard size hose you pull for any of the actual FIREFIGHTING duties to which we are tasked. The size that is expected for one person to handle in actual structure fires. The size that I HAVE handled by myself in actual structure fires. Well, the two of them let it go (couldn't handle it) and subsequently sprayed some of the on-lookers, one of whom recorded the fiasco and supposedly has put it on youtube. It sort of makes me want to throw in the towel because I feel like the dept. is such a joke at this point, but god damn if I will let them get to me like that. But, the light is pretty much green now. I used to just ignore them but I think I need to take a different tack. It has been around 2 years for Kristin and she's no bigger now than she ever was. It's not dress-up we're playing. Get your body ready to handle the job that YOU SIGNED UP FOR, or GTFO. It's bad for all of us but I feel like I have more of a stake in the game, them being female. I'll be damned if Chief has to ring the doorbell at 44 colony because your useless ass was my backup and you can't even hardly support an airpack, let alone do actual work.

Softly

He whispers it so sweetly into my ear, I want to grab onto it and hold it forever when it comes out, the way that it makes me feel inside, to be able to bury that somewhere deep within and go back to it later, alone. To examine. And it's always when I'm wrapped up in those massive arms, chest so wide that I can burrow my whole entire self within the space, and his arms all the way wrapped around me, God but to accept that this is what I deserve. "Baby," he says, and I am weaker than I have ever been. Fragile but there are those giant arms around me and the way you smell and how I can never breathe enough of it in. And that he looks at me and what I see in that green grey slate is that he knows he deserves it too. What a difference.

Something More Honorable Than This.

I don't want any of it. The way that his eyes looked he has been building up to that for awhile, I think, but there was some tacit supplication that I sent out into the far beyond that it would never pass his lips, that we could just continue to be best friends and comrades and all of that. And so, but it turns out that the quiet thing I hoped you would keep like a secret came out, and ...

I don't even have words for it. It just makes me sad, like I'm dying, to break your heart like that, why couldn't you just keep your mouth shut?! And now, and now. And in the middle of all of it a text, sweet dreams my emily, how can I possibly ever combine those two worlds now, after all that was said spilled out lying fragile there on the floor and still I didn't choose you? Cannot. They would kill each other. Desperation framed the conversation and none of it made any logical sense because really it should have worked, but it didn't, and so you move forward. You don't keep re-doing. We are still the exact same people that we were back then. His eyes so hopeful and end of the line and all I can think is how I want that space between your clavicle and sternocleidomastoid muscle, that little crevice, the scent of you, fill me with it. And how horrible it made me feel to be thinking that looking at someone so hopeful and a door slamming. Run over me.

Or The Highway

The house smelled like summer, in its incipient stage. Chest full of air just to try and contain it, like the softness when you walk into the beach house you rented sand and coppertone white tile floor and nothing pressing to do that day, smell of coffee perfuming the late morning air. You can drink it all, too, there's always another pot. "There are always more cigarettes," she said, eight lifetimes ago. When we would stay up all night talking on the deck or Paul H and how we had Jay call him from the phone in the gym, and she was right. There always were more.

It gets harder each time, but easier too in a way. The strange symbiosis and I wonder if anyone else goes through it. Or if it's limited just to those born as two. You can take or leave any situation in life, probably, because there is always something so much greater than one. There is so much strength in that, more than I have perhaps ever realized. To be blessed so. I don't know when it happened but it was sometime last night when I smiled for how spoiled we are by each other. But that I wouldn't change any part of it.

My class starts tomorrow. Last night we drove past the Cleveland Clinic and I imagined the life I will be living when I make that trek several times a week, winter especially, a thought that both thrills and frightens. I woke up one day last week, and I said that I want every third day and that entire this could be the night! your name on the board next to nozzle or second man or hydros, everything that goes along with it. It's funny (insane) to me how long we have all spent talking about it like it's simply something that either magically happens or doesn't. But I decided that one of those third days is mine, and I have to claim it, and so here we go. It's paramedic first. I may be too old, but what else is there for it? Nothing. To finish the 240 is next and I believe there will be some divine intervention that happens so that I can do that and work.

It's so impossible to explain the smell in there of diesel and of nomex when you first walk into the bay late summer sun streaming in over top of 42 and how the heart races with the baritone rumble once the engine turns over and the hiss of the airbrake releasing. And how infuriating it is when you work with people who don't still get excited about it. How it's that exact feeling of going on a first date, how you become billy bad-ass, how it takes everything in you not to just grin the entire time. Infinite possibility. And that I could have that, every third day. Will have. Do have. Just have to finish getting there.

Pitch Dark

This is how it started:

We had been prolonging the night because of so much joking and him letting me win at pool and how he nervously couldn't find the movie theater and then once inside, and late, his hand on the small of my back and there is an instant electric current shooting right through me, right through the core of me. We stood in the backyard at the ponderosa three o'clock in the morning looking at the stars and I felt those strong arms slide around my waist and a breath out and my head back against his chest, and a breath in and tingles up my neck. I turn to face him and have to stand on tippy-toes and our lips meet and the electricity is palpable and I can hear his heart beating through the roof and I wonder if he can hear mine too. And how his eyes were closed and the breath so fragile and how he bit his lower lip and that little smile every time we would pull away. This is so good. It's not a miracle, actually, to feel like that. Who knew.

The Memo.

I found this last night, I wrote it five years ago. And I liked it.

Whatever it is that you do, do it well. Do it unceasingly, without failure, without pompousness or grandeur, or the infiltration of ego. Half-heartedness is weakness. Lasting fame is uncertain, and a foolish goal. Do now, not for lasting fame, but for the pleasure that doing what you are meant to do brings you. For being good at it. Your success will cause others to discount your methods, or downplay your talent, or talk about perceived imperfections of your character. Don't listen to these petty idiots, the human tendency is to muddy up what shines brightly in order to bring it to a dull and unnoticeable level, a level that the majority can relate to. Greatness doesn't happen to a person, it must be rooted out, sought after, captured. You have to work, you can't be lazy.

It's within your reach, provided that you're willing to make sacrifices and acknowledge that the potential is within you. And to hell with the fools that would tell you that working doggedly for your own greatness is selfishness. The world would be a much different place if each person worked to cultivate and illuminate themselves. People want you to fail, or to be mediocre, or to be affected by the drama that so often defines human existence. Shock them by doing the opposite. True to your nature, true to your self.

Yes.

Heart beating like a hammer and how he sneaked in behind me. And those sea salt blue eyes, grey slate eyes that you could spend three lifetimes in. Too soon to think that way though but the subtle way he got closer to show me the pictures and when I grabbed his arm and the face lit up and I just had totally forgotten what that's like. Absolutely intoxicating. His smile was like when you close your eyes and try to permanently impress some fleetingly impossibly beautiful passing moment into your forever memory. Like as a kid at Myrtle Beach and it's the last time you'll stand in that hallway smelling the ocean and hearing the gulls, drapes flapping against the hotel window car's all loaded up time for the long trek home. The impossible fragility of that moment and how it tears your heart but how, somehow, that's where life really resides. In that moment.

It's nice just to be back out there. Possibilities feel limitless. Even if it doesn't last. I wrote that night, the night of the breakdown, there is someone in the world you were meant to be with. And you were born with her. The rest is anyone's guess. So make good decisions. And I will. Those giant arms around me and a good night, I have never even thought about dating someone that muscular. And attractive. And soft spoken. The rest is anyone's guess.