Gifts

Little sweetheart, I'm looking at one of your first cards to me. It's in a frame over my desk. It came with a gorgeous coffee table art book and you sent it to me on my birthday, just months after we first met, just after I'd come back to New York, just before your first visit here.

I remember that we talked increasingly and almost every day on the phone in those first few weeks after the play had closed in San Francisco and I had returned to NYC. My birthday was just less than a month after that. And soon after, you called to tell me that you were thinking of coming to visit. You wondered if you should just come for a weekend or a whole week. I told you that you should definitely come for the whole week because if you didn't, afterwards, we'd be sad.

You did come, of course, and it was magic. We really were quite new to each other still. They say that new couples are tested when they first travel together. This was far more intimate than that. The two of us bumping about here together in my little apartment for a week. But it was perfect and we were perfectly compatible and comfortable with each other immediately. It was extraordinary and it confirmed every feeling we had for each other. Later, after you returned to San Francisco - and not before we immediately made another plan of when to see each other next (in London at the end of the month) - you emailed to say you were "sorry to have left the place in such a tip" (a mess) and that I shouldn't think that you "hadn't seen (me) walking around behind and cleaning up after (you)." I wrote back to tell you the truth - I wasn't concerned about any mess or cleaning up, I was bewitched and simply couldn't stop following you around from room to room, so in love and overjoyed to have you here.

In the card that I'm looking at, this card you sent me with the gift for my birthday just a few weeks before you arrived and stayed here with me for the first time, you write so lovingly and charmingly, telling me about finding the book at the great little store in The Mission - Needles & Pens - where I'd taken you (and would again many times) and that you also wanted to include some gingersnaps from the bakery in your neighborhood (where we also would go together many times) but that you were worried they'd be "smashed to skitter with the heavy book and all...".

It's a beautiful note, little sweetheart, and noteworthy for being so early in our time together, that - like your calling to say you've impulsively decided to come visit but are making sure that's alright -  it still has the slightest hint of “if-that’s-okay” politeness about the fringes of our mutual head-over-heels falling in love. You say in the note that you’re hoping I don’t already have this book but that if I do, then I “better tell you & don’t be all nice and not mention it… OK?”.

Little sweetheart, no one has ever been as blessed as I to have been found and loved by you. As I sit here this morning wanting so much to write something down for you and so very mindful that yesterday I was not at my best, regretting it and praying that I may be better, do better, be worthy of the great gift that is you, I look at this treasure from our first days together and the words begin to come, the thoughts begin to appear, the love in my heart begins to swell.

I know I must do better and that I can. I vow that I will. I vow to quiet myself and take today one breath at a time with gratitude for you. And a prayer that I may be worthy, that you will let me call to you and hear and help and guide me. I will do better, my little sweetheart. I promise. Please, please be with me. With all my love forever…