So yeah, The Chicken Man.  Met him.  No doubt.  No kidding.  No pie in the sky bullshit dream because I want it so bad I mistake it for something it isn’t.  This is it and the ride has begun. Meet D, Mr. Furnace.  D, meet the peoples.  Now for the background and build up to make you wait still further in suspense.

As you know, I had what I considered a prophetic dream a couple of years (!) ago.  And I’ve referred to the hoped for person as the Chicken Man.  Since then I’ve kept my eyes open and I’ve thought I found him a couple times for about, well a second, and in one stellar case of disaster and disappointment and eventually at least friendship, 3 weeks.

What I got from that harsh lesson was finally arriving at the point where I gave up hope and stopped looking for the Chicken Man.  You know the one, every time you’ve been single and looking again some friend, who you love but want to duct tape her mouth shut says, “it always happens when you least expect it.” That one right?  Maddening.  But you know it’s true even though it totally pisses you off and then the dismay of realizing that turning yourself off that way is oh so hard because how do you make yourself believe something like that when you simply don’t want to, you want to make it happen, how could you stop hoping?  Looking?  You know its true and that it’s your only hope and yet, if you’re like me, you cling to old ways.  The only way most of us, okay me, can get to the point of least hope, least expectations, is to fail.

I am not a quitter and I rarely fail at anything I put my mind to.  But when it comes to matters of the heart I have some stellar failures and a whole lot of lost causes.  It’s to my credit that most of them I am on friendly terms with, even the most recent disaster. And after almost 2 years I gave up. FINALLY. Sort of. I had been over a barrel in many areas of my life, mucho disappointments of many kinds last year and I just no longer had the stomach to put any energy into hoping and I just decided that I needed to clean up after the fire and sleep when I could and get over it.

The day came when there was nothing left to clean up after the fire.  Nothing left to clean up from the disaster of The Forgiven.  Nothing left to clean up that I knew of in my heart and mind.  I’d done the work, worked hard, sometimes despairing that I would ever get There, There being the goal of reasonable mental health when it came to love and sobriety.

And then one day I was playing around on Facebook because I always did. I had no job, no life, no money, nothing on the horizon, and then  someone, a person I friended simply because he looked interesting and he knew a slew of my friends, posted a Small Faces video.  I said something like, Like, and he responded back and there we were talking about The Main Man, Steve and the Boyz.  And something in my heart perked up.

See, I did some love magic last Samhain.  If you recall, my beloved dead ended up through forgetfulness and the power of the internet to be Steve Marriott and my ex-husband Joel. I’d left my familial dead photos at home and had to improvise in the moment.  You can call me a wingnut and I really don’t give a damn but Steve and Joel were talking to me and I asked them to help me find love.  Basically I said, hey you two are obviously talking to each other, you know what I like and what I need so send my man to me soon and make sure he’s not an alcoholic like you guys. And stop popping in to chat when I’m in the shower, jeesh.  Some people NEVER change. So there I was having this conversation with someone who was as head over heels about The Small Faces as I was and my heart took a peek and I thought, “Hmmm, I wonder. He’s kind of attractive and clearly has a brain.”  Over the course of a few more weeks we engage in other facebook small talk and in one instance a very passionate and yet polite disagreement over the legalization of all drugs (I was for it).   And I thought hmmm, that went very well.  Very soon after that I invited him to have an IM chat.

He accepted.  We chatted.  He was polite and yet a little, hmmm, restrained.  Eventually conversations became far more interesting and after about 6 weeks they became passionate and very sexy and we were riding waves of simpatico goodness.  One of the things we had in common was that both of us lost ex-spouses to suicide.  We lost spouses to addiction.  We have a lot of damage and pain in varying degrees, some repaired, some in progress.  We had much to discuss and sometimes the chats were incredibly intense.  And the more intense they got the more curious and turned on I became.  We talked about music and the old days of our punk rock history, what we’d been doing since, what we believed in, our spiritual paths, blah blah blah.  He didn’t have as much time as I did to chat so things were a bit sporadic but when we got a chance we were off to the races a mile a minute.

We decided we HAD to meet.  It took, hmmm, three more weeks to do so.  He has health issues. They tire him out.  All it took was one horrifying car t-boning him in the street to change his life forever and ever amen.  Doesn’t bother me a bit but it does challenge him.  When we met he wasn’t having that great a day.  Life was throwing him some intense stuff that turned out to be the Finale of the fireworks show on the 4th of July.  Big Bang and loud music and you know the end is coming but you can’t quite see when.  He was exhausted.  He was grey around the edges.  He was nervous.  I was charmed and intrigued.  We just knew we had to meet again and we did a couple days later, in a park in the sun, and he looked better than a few days previous.

We kept chatting but I didn’t see him for three more weeks. His challenge was wearing him down and really taxing his strength and resources.  Every few days I gave up hope that anything was going to come of it.  It made me sad but not as sad as it would if I kept pursuing him and failed. Again. Every time I made the decision to break off communication, I’d hear from him within an hour.  It  was a little uncanny.  This had the effect of re-energizing me for a few more days as we limped along, trying to let the universal energy flow in the direction it was meant to flow in. Limp. Limp. Oh Goody! Stumble. Limp. Hey There. Brick Wall.  Limp.  Hey you!  The conversations remained amazing and intense so I kept on keeping on.  My intuition told me to keep at it for just a little longer.

Just over a week ago the challenge in his life, for all intents and purposes, basically disappeared.  In a puff of smoke.  Poof it was suddenly gone.  Just as suddenly our opportunity opened up.  We met again.  What an explosion! It’s been gangbusters ever since.  I see him almost every day, we talk constantly, we chat constantly, my phone actually rings now, and I get text messages.  I call him, text him, IM him.   I knew this was here.  I knew we really had something going on.  What’s really blowing MY mind is that so does he.  He’s as excited about this as I am.  He’s responsive, attentive, excited, deliberate, and oh fuck me, he’s beautiful and kind and sweet and funny and smart and thinks like me and wants what I want and buys my chairs.  He’s not an alcoholic.  He thinks I’m beautiful.  We already knew I was smart and funny and sweet and all that other stuff didn’t we.  But beautiful? Lovable?  Not so much.

So that is the story of how we started this thing going.  What is going on now? Today?  This minute?  Holy mother of god and all the stars in the heavens.  The conversations are better than ever, more intense, more intimate, more detailed, more unexpected.  He kept saying things that are on my Partner List.  Which I gave him a couple of days ago.  Check, check, check, check, check. Plus legs like trees.  God, his butt hits my sternum.  I am not exaggerating and I could not be more pleased.  We are revealing ourselves, literally and figuratively, slowly, bit by bit.  We are taking most things slowly as the mood takes us and as time allows.  The one thing we are not taking slowly from this point on is declaring our undying love and affection for each other.  Knowing how I feel about love in general, this is obviously true no matter what happens in our relationship.  That said, this is the real thing.  Swear to god.  I know of what I speak.

One of the things I know is that my friends and well, my enemies, will probably say, she’s just smitten. They’re infatuated. No way could they possibly know they’re really in love at this point. I remember a part of the book, The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, my bible after my divorce from Joel.  She was talking about her lover who was gone.  She mentioned that in the beginning he would look out the window and he’d say look dear, it’s raining and she would look out the window and it would be sunny but she would say, yes love, it’s raining, isn’t it beautiful.  And one day he looked out the window and said, look dear it’s raining, and she looked and it was sunny and she said, bloody idiot, it’s NOT raining and it was over.  I know folks will think I’m in love with a guy who says its raining and it just isn’t.  That one day I might wake up and find disappointment.  Don’t deny it, we all wonder about that when our friends fall in love so fast.   We secretly hope it will happen to us that fast, that even if it is sunny and not raining, we’ll have the little bit of freedom to love no matter what the facts are.  For those naysayers, I say fie on your sadness.  I’ve been around the block.  I know fucked up relationships like the back of my hand.  I know a good man when I meet him.

Is it bringing up issues I thought didn’t exist any more?  Yes.  This has challenged me greatly.  I have discovered for instance that I still feel unworthy of truly great love.  I have discovered that I still have abandonment issues.  I have discovered that there is someone I can tell anything to and he’s still here.  I have never, NEVER, told a single living person the things I have told him.  Seriously, never before.   He knows my darkest secrets, my biggest failings, my greatest fears, even the fears that revolved around my feelings for him.  He’s still here and he’s telling me HIS.  He talks as much as me.  It’s as if a dam has broken, and I suppose that’s true, a dam has broken.  The dams around our hearts are broken and the flow is gushing.  Awesome.  We’re healing each other.

Meet D. He’s the man.  The Chicken Man. Oops, he says he’s NOT a or the Chicken Man. hahahahaha.  I can handle that. I called him Mr. Furnace and that one is sticking. Intense flames? Wow.  I’ve never been here before and I just know it’s going to be good on into, well, wherever.  Why? Because it already is.  It’s raining and sunny and hot and just the way I like it.  Without the pain.  Without the fear.  Love. Not Fear. So this is what it looks like.