Chalcea,
You'd just gotten back from Lawrence. A week-long jury trial, the man who got arrested for crossing a police boundary that was never actually up. Your team wanted to debrief over dinner at Charleston's in OP, and you wanted me there.
Except I didn't know that, and I made you say it about four times.
We had plans. Then you told me there needed to be a work recap, and I genuinely could not tell if you were uninviting me or folding me in. So I kept asking. Are you telling me, or are you asking me.
And you said you struggle to ask people for things that might inconvenience them.
Here's what I said, and I want it written down.
That's what I signed up for. You have never once asked me for anything that felt like an inconvenience. Not once. And asking is literally why I'm here. I want to be the person you call on a bad day. I want to tag along to your work thing. I want to flex around your life in whatever shape it actually is that week, because none of that has anything to do with how real this is, or how deep it goes, or how I feel about you.
So we went.
Brent came out to meet us and asked who I was, how we got here, what I do. He said "Tell me whatever you want to tell me," which sounds generous but is actually the hardest possible question, because it could be so many things.
I'll note for the record that I was being interviewed about my intentions by a criminal profiler. No pressure.
I told him we matched on Tinder. And that you'd been stalking me for a while before that. Jokingly. Mostly.
Then I told him what I actually think, which is that on our first date you were more vulnerable and more real than most people I have ever dated. I asked you questions and you gave me direct answers. You didn't hide, and you didn't make me earn a certain number of months before you'd let me actually know you.
I don't want superficial connection. I want to get into someone's soul and know the whole human being.
And I told him the thing that has stuck with me since before we ever spoke, which is the line you put in your Tinder profile:
Life's too short to not explore your shadow self.
You put that in public, on a dating app, where anyone could see it. Doing that is what lets other people know you at that depth. When someone is running from that part of themselves, connecting with them becomes work, because there's a room in the house they won't open.
You are not afraid of the darkness, or of the ego side of being human. I think that will be the number one thing I am attracted to about you until the very end. It's a genuinely beautiful thing.
Anyway. I got a salmon salad. You got roasted chicken, on the bone, and then made sure I could still eat my food, because I'd mentioned to you once that bone-in food is hard for me. Once. You remembered.
I had wine, you had a martini, and the conversation with Angela and Brent was good all night.
And then the butterflies.
Angela sat down and I noticed her earrings immediately. Blue butterflies. Dolly Parton had just passed, and blue butterflies were one of her signs, so I asked Angela if that's why she was wearing them. She said no.
I didn't tell the table the rest of it.
After my dad died, I got a reading that said he would show up as blue butterflies. It's been a while since I've seen any.
I believe that when people pass, they go back to a kind of universal consciousness. Their original energy. I don't believe in a heaven or a hell. I believe they become their whole self, and that whoever they were on this earth is not who they are now. Which matters to me, because my dad and I could not get along in this life, and there was no deep connection there to lose. But once he passed, I've been open to that being different. If he wants to be around and look out for me, he's welcome. Good things only.
I've seen blue butterflies a handful of times, and they've landed next to some of the most beautiful things that have happened to me.
They showed up at a table where I was telling your coworkers why I'm not afraid of your shadows.
Wink.
We walked out after and you tried to walk me to my car, and I told you absolutely not, you don't feel good, get in your car, I'll see you at your house. So we went to your house and I got in bed and held you until you fell asleep.
Then I got my stuff and left, and you got up and locked the door behind me.
And then I realized I'd left my salmon salad inside. So I had to knock on the door of the woman I had just tucked in, and you opened it back up and let me back in, and we laughed about it for a long time.
I have so much fun with you.
And so far I have adored every single person you've introduced me to.
More of this, please.
Noel