Lilac Colored Glasses

I’ve been trying to pick a flashback that you, my following, would be interested in. This was tough. The stuff I can remember is not usually very captivating, but the other, more entertaining/scandalous memories are either partially cloudy for eternity (kinda like Belgium) or not optimal fodder for future employers that may run a search and find this blog. So I’ve decided to take you all back to a day I think about every so often. It wasn’t very long ago but it was the start of something that would bring about some huge changes in my life.

It was late summer, 2006, probably the very end of August or beginning of September. CB and I had been chatting sporadically via Live Messenger for much of the summer. He and his girlfriend had broken up towards the beginning of the summer and I knew he was still pretty down about it so when I saw him online (which was rare with the six hour time difference) I made sure to ask how he was and what he was up to. I had actually been talking to a guy that lived out of state since June and he had come for a weekend in August to stay at my apartment. It ended up a real disaster and I decided that, with a full time and part time job and grad school starting in January, it was time to call it quits and label myself “Spinster Cat Lady-In-Training.”

Right about that time I had one of my insomniac periods (this has been going on since I was 19 or 20 although the length and severity of the insomnia has decreased over time) and ended up talking to CB more and more. He left me occasional hello’s for when I got home from work some days and I found myself waking up a little earlier in the mornings so we could chat before I had to leave for the day. After several weeks he mentioned that he was trying to meet some new people that lived closer to him (his last girlfriend lived in the Netherlands and the distance had been somewhat of an issue). We were pretty friendly by this time so I typed, “Aww…no more long distance relationships? Damn, there goes my dream of us getting married and living happily ever after.”
He didn’t answer.
Oh crap I thought. Guess I pushed the jokes too far.
After a few more seconds he replied, “Is there any truth to what you said?”
And I thought for a bit: yes, he was a very funny, helpful, sweet, honorable man, as far as I could tell (we had known each other for almost a year at that point but had never really talked till that summer) but for goodness sake, he lived in Belgium! And besides, I had my eye on a coworker at my weekend job.
Finally I typed back, “In the beach that is my statement maybe one grain of sand is the truth.”
(I like to make analogies a LOT. My mom can vouch for that, so no, this is not poeticized, it’s what I really said)

And we agreed right then that, while we definitely enjoyed our friendship, anything more would be totally unrealistic.

The one thing that I have learned time and time again during the 26 years that have comprised my life; one of the very few absolutes in this world is that things don’t always go how we plan.
But one thing I do know is that a lot is being built right now and it all started with that single grain of sand.

“To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.”-William Blake