His first name starts with D. He is Italian and speaks pretty much perfect English. He is seven years younger than me. He is currently in Europe. I met him my last week in New Zealand–something I was specifically trying not to do, hook up with a cute boy right before I left–and after a couple of days with him I screwed up my courage and asked him to come to Samoa with me. We are, as of this writing, trying to find a way to live in the same city, country, and hemisphere. We met a month ago tomorrow.

He’s very big and tall and has beautiful blue eyes and a beard (a beard!). He talks to everyone and everyone loves him wherever he goes. His favorite things to drink are apple juice and milk. He’s an economist and has spent a lot of time abroad working with various NGOs. He loves sailing and tramping and photography and three types of cereal all in the same bowl for breakfast. When we left Samoa he gave me an old shirt of his, the one we were wearing when we first kissed, that advertises an Italian valve company and comes down to my knees. You’ve never seen a smile like his in your entire life, I guarantee it. He loves stories: any kind of story, all kinds of stories. He reads this blog and told me his favorite entry so far is this one. He asked me one time, perfectly seriously, how I deal with all the other girls being jealous of my ass. He is kind and gentle and funny and smart and sweet. The staff at a bakery in Auckland where we went every morning the last weekend in Auckland thought we were on our honeymoon and we didn’t correct them. I am crazy about him.

And that’s it for now, about him. I know you understand. Obviously there’s more of a story here, and a huge part of me wants to share it here–because GIRL. Girl, it is good. It involves lots of late-night conversation, lots of making out, lots of driving around the far north of the north island, lots of frolicking–really, there has been actual frolicking–on various beaches, lots of email, lots of my saying “Ancora una volta per l’americana!” when we talk in Italian. It involves a lot of discussion of jobs and visas and passports and residencies and plane tickets. It involves a lot of closing my eyes and taking a deep breath and deciding not to let the past dictate the future. It involves a little craziness and a lot of happiness.

But I have learned the hard way what it means to share all those details about someone who is so important to me, about whom I care an indecent, inordinate amount, on this blog. I have only deleted one entry ever out of these archives (and that had to do with kangaroos, not boys) because I feel very strongly that my life is my life, that what I write about here really happens and that deleting an entry is lying. But still. I can hardly bear to read this entry now. Or this one, or this one or especially this one. This one one still hurts a little. Even this one is weird to think about, now.

And it’s not that I regret writing those entries–even if I hadn’t written them I’d still have the memories, which are, I’m sorry to say, much more difficult than the entries themselves. It’s just that I want to keep this one a little closer to my chest, a little closer to my heart. I keep trying to write a fourth sentence to this paragraph and nothing is coming, nothing makes sense, other than to say that this has happened, that this is real.

Well, one more thing, actually, comes to mind. We were sitting on the beach in Samoa talking about love: what it had been like before, what it was like now. I looked out to the reef break and told him about hearing “It’s So Easy” by Linda Rondstadt when I was a kid, you know: ‘It’s so easy to fall in loooooove, it’s so easy to FALL in LOVE.” And how I’d asked my mom what that meant, and she just sort of laughed and shrugged and said it was just an expression, and how I imagined that grown-ups were always tumbling and tripping off big tall cliffs, falling all the way down onto…what? What was down there? Rocks, tumbleweeds and cactus, a bouncy castle, what?

Later on I found out: you fall onto all of those things. You get bruised and cut and scraped and occasionally you sustain such a serious injury that it’s all you can do to drag yourself out of that stony canyon back to the calm green meadow where your friends and family and community are waiting for you, where you can heal and grow and have hot chocolate and go to bellydance and generally enjoy yourself as long as you don’t want too much. Sometimes you fling yourself off the cliff again, of course, but after the first rough landing, after the second or fifth or twentieth time, you learn where the steep edge is and you begin to just avoid the whole thing altogether, to take alternate, fenced-off routes.

But this time, I told him, it’s like tumbling into the warm and brilliant lagoon, into a new world full of amazing, improbable creatures. There are poisonous corals and the occasional shark, of course, mostly there is dreamy floating amongst the brightly colored fish, the undulating seaweeds, the calm caressing waves. I’m not scared of drowning, I can breathe just fine, and I’ve never seen anything like this before.

And I’m just going to keep going, keep swimming, as long as I want to, as long as he does too. I will tell you all about it as my gills keep growing.

Posted on June 7th, 2008 by Chiara
Filed under: Everything