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The Right Thing

In Defense of a Soulmate
by: Debrewerq

He has a way of cradling his palm behind my neck, drawing me closer in to his body and artfully, expertly tracing my waist with authoritative fingertips. He brushes loose strands of hair away from my forehead, frames my face with both his hands, tilts my head, just so, and blinks in slow motion… I can barely hear him whisper. "HodE," he says in quiet strength. He kisses me the way only he can. Skillfully. Playfully. Extraordinarily. It is… subterranean bliss.

I believe!

Yet bEt neN, me, a practical, cynical Ethiopian woman with keen immigrant sensibilities and New York know-how, acting as a negere fej for soul mates? I am not exactly sure myself.

One of my best friends, who, besides a chosen profession as an attorney, is a woman of unimpeachable character, had early on diagnosed me as an avowed commitment phobe. Not exactly a chilling indictment coming from a woman who once broke up with a guy because she didn't like his wasabi-to-soy sauce ratio when dining on sushi. It takes one to know one, I suppose.

Long after I had fled my last long-term relationship, shamelessly absconding with the man's heart, I kept hearing his parting words: "I hope you never know. I hope you never know what it is like to have your love rejected. I hope you never know what it is like to have your insides shut down and crumble. I hope you never know what it is like to reach nirvana and crash down to hell. I love you that much to pray you never know…"

There were times when I though his words were a curse.

It was not commitment I was running away from. It was the wrong kind of commitment. After all, deep inside, I am a good little girl. I believed, even when I was running away from it, in love. But I believed in that impossible concoction, so addictive as it is elusive, in love, passion and contentment. And that, my friends, was asking too much of Fate. It was a call to arms against Fate and the instincts of my foremothers who lived long lives with men who had stopped holding their hands and looking in their eyes way before they became mothers. "Fqr qess b'lo yimeTal", they told me. "Don't take the love a good man and desecrate it," Fate warned me.

I knew I was tempting Fate. How many chances would She give a defiant believer?

Who was it that said that the greatest tragedy was the inability to love? Even as I teetered on the brink of being a poster child for that maxim, I met its exigent gaze. I saw and raised the stakes, and… and luckily for me, it blinked first.

There is something about the way he says my name… in mock grandiosity… possessive… protective… He enunciates my name in such a way that it is as if I hear it for the very first time, every time. The first day he said my name I asked him to say it again… and again… and again…And every time he did the veins in my temple quivered…

I've been surrounded with mine and other people's failed marriages and relationships all my life. Even so, conceptually, (aided, methinks, by sappy Hallmark cards at $3.95 a pop) I believed in marriage… at least in long-term relationships that were longer than… a year. But then the seesaw creaked back up…Love is good. But is love or dbn yale fQr necessary for me to be happy? True, it was getting tedious dealing with personality differences, head games, head cases, headaches. I felt confined, confounded, contorted. Neger gn, I was still a girl in a woman's body. I laughed like a girl but hurt like a woman. And I still believed in there being someone out there who could make my eyelashes sweat and my heart veins distend, someone whom I could love even if I saw him wearing white socks with black shoes.

Isn't that the sign of the ultimate disciple? To blindly believe in something so… seemingly, mockingly, unempirically impossible? I tried not to want a soul mate. I wanted not to believe in it. But I stayed faithful even when I preached its words, even as those very words echoed emptily in my heart.

Have you ever thought of your life as a perfect black-and-white movie? And then… is it by luck? by sheer coincidence? through divine intervention? because the stars align?… that someone throws a specter of a million colors your way… You blink rapidly and try to summon up your tattered logic…but this time you know, and you surrender… I talked to him way before I saw him. Millions of little towns separated him and me, so we talked a lot at first. And one day we talked so much that my stomach stung.

Irrationally and dangerously capriciously, I had decided to date practical men… Yemaykebdu kind of men, as they say in some circles. Passion? Ferggeddabaoutit! No waves… no soul-searching, zero angst… marry, have kids, buy a house, get a mortgage… bara bing, bara boom.

So, on paper, I should have been happy. The guy in my path was Ethiopianly pragmatic, used phrases like "Federal Surety Bond" and "Statutory Accounting Principles" in normal conversation, and knew '71 was not a good year for wine.

… How many times can one tempt Fate?

Speed dialed my good friend.

"Ehh.."
"What?"
"He… wants to get married. I think."
"How do you know?"
"Ehh… he said 'Do you want to get married?'"
"Palpable hint. And you said…?"
"Waiter, can I have a bigger bowl for my oyster shells."
"Niiiiice."
"What do you want me to do?! Do you know how hard it is to get the attention of a waiter at Balthazar on a Saturday night?"
"You have a point. How were the oysters?"

I banged my head against my bathroom wall. I impeached him for being the very thing I had trained my mind to want.

Good teeth?
Check.
Great friends and family?
Check.
Plays well with others?
Check.
Potential to be a good father?
Check.
Has gone to a museum in the last year? Reads books? Can fix minor computer problems?

Check. Check… and checkity check.

…But that seesaw creaked back to life…

Looks blankly at me when I burst into tears and go off on my famously overly elated soliloquies about a paragraph I read in a book?

Check.

Can't understand why I talk to myself?

Check.

Won't kiss me when he is on the phone, and hates it when I whisper raunchy stuff into his ear when he is making plane reservations?

Check.

He couldn't understand why I left. I didn't understand why I wanted… needed to leave. I held my breath, bit my lip, closed my eyes and left, knowing I was rolling the dice against a game I had heavily stacked against myself. My fear of never loving or being loved again was not yet stronger than my will. How sad, I thought, that I needed to destroy the myth to prove it was no myth. The line between love and madness is no line at all. It is a blip. You take the wrong step and you are an under-whelming and piteous statistic. I couldn't stand it if I ended up being a cliché. So, I walked away to prove that I could.

I knew I was in trouble the afternoon I was taking a flight to see him for the first time. Trying to not think about him before the excruciatingly long time between check-in and boarding, I slipped into a magazine kiosk by the gate. I browsed absentmindedly until I heard "Last call to board!". Hurriedly, I put the magazine I was thumbing through in a daze while I tried not to think about him back in the rack. And then I noticed. I was thumbing through a bridal magazine. I had lived in this country 15+ years and I had never thumbed through a bridal magazine. And certainly not while I was trying not to think about a man I was really thinking about. The magazine burned my hands.

There were no measured steps here. There was no biding for time. No playing footsie under a crowded table.

I have sage friends who preach that True Love, unlike its dysfunctional diQala cousin, Lust, is supposed to be gradual. Carefully orchestrated flirting would eventually (and in Ethiopian terms, "eventually" could mean anything from ke-s'eaat behuwala to irresolute eternity) foQeQ mallet to choosing kitchen tile.

Speed dial.

"I think I'm in trouble this time."
"Did you press contrl+alt+delete?"
"Not this time. It's too weird what is happening between this guy and me."
"And this is different from all the other times because…?"
"Because… it hurts to even think about walking away from him."
"Good morning!"
"I am jealous of the air particles he breathes…"
"Does it feel good?"
"I don't know. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes not so good. "And most times?"
"Most times it feels like the time we were six and someone loosened the tight braids in our hair."
"Dammmmmmmmm!"
"I need it to stop. I need to find contrl+alt+delete."
"No you don't."
"No. I don't. I really don't."

I knew I loved him by the way we fought… He called me past midnight one evening. I had passed the day bravely pretending that something he said in passing had not hurt me… My trusted armor was up... my voice was chipper…But he saw through me before my first "Hi, yene Qonjo…" "I know I hurt you," he interrupted me quietly, slicing through my heart in one clean swipe. "What I said was careless and I know I hurt you because I know your voice. And I can't sleep knowing I upset you."

I often wondered if I believed I was in love because I wanted to be in love. A classic case of an over-neurotosized chick who was in love with being in love. Ibdet… QnTot…

"How did you know he was 'it'?" another good friend asked me. "And don't give me the crap about 'You just know'!'"

I swear, you just know. But there are some signs. I looked at him from across a room one day and I saw him thirty years from that one moment, holding my hands and kissing me on my crusty old lips. I saw our grandchildren on each of his laps while he read to them. I saw myself, thirty and one years from that very moment, taking care of him, wiping his glasses, and him saying to me "GelayE… nei esti. Nei'inna aTegebE quCH bei," just like he says to me now.

We laugh at things that no one else can understand. Sometimes I laugh so hard he has to mockingly chide me. "Tejajilesh ajajalshiN". And every time we laugh together, and he looks me in my eyes, I want to hide in his shoulders. The first time he really made me laugh hard he said, "Dess sitiy. SitifleQeleQi." My heart stopped.

He's never been caught in a lie. Not even once. Not even in the tiniest most insignificant instances.

How can one person's presence sooth me? One day, after a long day, I must have grumpily snapped some smart alecky comment at him. He looked at me. He didn't touch me. He just looked at me and said, "Minew zarE hod basebN?" I melted. I wanted never to be grumpy again.

I don't know how you know. I just know that I am crying as I write these words.

Not everyone needs a soul mate, and I wonder if they are not the lucky ones among us. The ones who can find contentment without accoutrements.

The greatest victory in life might just be the one we win against the war with ourselves. And I don't know if Fate let me win, or I triumphed because I believed. But I am grateful to Her for letting me believe in unreality. And I am grateful to him for showing me that ibdEt, in the defense of a soul mate, is no vice.

And, God help me, I have found my soul mate. I have found someone whose gentleness makes my heart stop screaming. I have found someone who has freed me to run away. I have found someone who is holding me tight. I found someone who will fight for me. I have found someone without any pretensions about his vulnerabilities and who is aware of mine. And for the first time in my life, I am open to being hurt by him, hurt and destroyed, yet I know mutual respect will never let us mark wounds on each other. I was looking for him and I found him, the only man who will ever make me see a million colors.

I look into his beautiful brown eyes from across a room, and I realize… I believe!


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