Total Eclipse Redux.

"Every now and then,
I know you'll never be the boy you always wanted to be.
(Turn around)
Every now and then
I know you'll always be the only boy who wanted me the way that I am."

So last night when I was being ridiculous and mopey about how one day the Ex will die and no one will tell me and let me throw roses on his casket, I started thinking of how he'd put me on this strange pedestal. He had the most impressive Virgin-Whore complex of any man I've ever met, and while I loved being a magical and wondrous thing for him...it was never real.

And of course, when I'm in that kind of mood, I always turn to Bonnie Tyler and her infinite wisdom. And there, I find the lyrics about the boy never being right for himself, but somehow wanting the woman in all her flawed glory.

My husband is a miracle in so many ways. He loves ME...the girl who slept around, the little girl with the abuse, the woman with fat on her thighs and bags under her eyes. From the metaphysical to the absolute and utterly physical, the thing that first made me realize that I love him in this irrefutable and endless way is his final, whole-hearted acceptance of me. I'm never pretending with him, and never hiding.

The things that he finds most alluring about me physically are the things that I normally want to hide. Flaws and scars and smells turn him on...he might not notice if I spend an hour putting on makeup, but let him find me vaccuuming in a pair of sweatpants with sweat dripping down my ass crack, and he can't keep his hands off of me.

Until lately, there's been nothing that I couldn't say or feel or do or think. He loved it all.

He said one night while we were lying in bed, talking while we fell asleep in that sweetest, sweetest time of day, that what had hurt him so much lately with all my criticism of him (and he acknowledged that much of what he felt was criticism was my honest feelings skewed into criticism through the filter of his recovery craziness) was that I'd always made him feel better about the person who he is. He has been responding so strongly because he didn't know how to think of himself without me bolstering him.

While I'm not going to be his cheerleader when it's false, I finally understood what he's trying to get from me...it's that acceptance that we've always had with one another...that full-on, forever-no-matter-what acceptance that's brought us together. It's what makes us fit. We're both real fuckers, real creative, crazy, beautiful, remorseless fuckers with baggage and gifts and issues and mess...but it's always made sense, and felt like balance until this latest chapter when all our weight has been thrown off kilter.

So I want to get back to that place, or for us to get back to that place, that perfect fitting, like lips pressing against an eye-socket.

And that's what love is supposed to be, I think. When you're doing it right, you should like yourself more because of the way you love the person you're loving. It should feel like it fits, inside and out.