Time

The first days have been unreal. And for the first time in a long time, I have been forced to be mindful, every second of every day. It's odd how time slips away so painlessly when you're too busy to notice, you'd think that would be when its passage would be felt more keenly, because time is presumably precious when the hours in the day to get everything done that you're meant to.

Yet during those first nights, spent in the hospital with GM sleeping and trying to recover by my side (he has, true to form, admitted in retrospect that he was maybe just a little bit terrified that something would go wrong with me or the baby, although my mother has mentioned several times how calm he sounded when they were on the phone), and even when we got home to our flat where the bedroom wall paint has barely had a chance to dry, I have never felt the passage of time so intimately, painfully almost.

Looking at this beautiful creature flailing its arms in my lap, how little she is, how perfectly formed, acting on instinct only and seeking comfort, feeding, sleep with admirable singularity, and knowing that when this second, minute, hour, night, has passed, it is gone forever. She will grow a little, become more sentient, that moment will never return, it will be lost. I try to savour these moments, etch them into my brain somehow, daring barely to blink in case I miss something.

Of course, remembering that level of detail is impossible, especially when one is getting by on 1.5 hrs of sleep at a time. But that feeling will stay with me. When they say parenthood changes you forever, I think to me, knowledge of that feeling is what is implied. Once it's tasted, it lingers and though it wanes, it hangs like a shadow in the back of my mind always, even in the daytime. Is it love? I'm not sure. But it's something bigger than myself, something outside the scope of just me, this baby, my lovely, amazing man. And it amplifies the sound of sand passing through the hour glass of my life, it echoes in my head drowning out everything else.

Birth

I've been so busy since Christmas I've not even had time to blog. And now she's here, our little miracle.

Birth was tough, tougher than I'd hoped, I don't think I'd have survived without the heroic, nay, epic, support of GM. But now the whole ordeal with vacuums, arms stuffed inside me to dislodge stuck body parts and multiple midwives battering my belly seems so distant, as if it happened to someone else. And the emergency cesarian didn't happen. All's well that ends well.

Was it painful? I don't really know how to answer that. At first, the pain was there, but manageable. And towards the end, it was washing over me in waves, rendering me a crying, helpless child in the arms of my lover. I don't think the pain was unbearable though, not in itself. But on top of utter exhaustion, it was too much. Epidurals really are the gift of God to birthing women.

There are only two things I remember very clearly from the birth. The first are the hands of my man, holding me, soothing me, his chest against my cheek, his arms pressed around me, holding me tight, his voice whispering words that now escape me. The smell of his T-shirt, how good it felt to have him to hold on to, even when my body was being torn into pieces by contractions or medical staff of various valor. The knowledge, deep inside, that this man will stand by me always, he will never leave me. And I will never want to leave him either.

The second is the feeling as the baby slipped from my body, how hot she felt, and I was thinking how she could be so much hotter than me, coming from inside me. She was put on my chest for a brief second before being whisked away because she wasn't breathing, but as she touched my skin on the outside for the first time, she seized to be an abstraction, a series of hiccups in my abdomen at 0430 in the morning, a heel poking out below my right hand side ribs, a heavy feeling on the opening of my pelvis, and started to be a person in her own right, and I knew she was the same one, it was odd, knowing her movements and the weight of her body so well, yet knowing nothing at all of her as an individual. GM went with her to see her being weighed and massaged, and I lay there crying, the absence for a minute of them both seemed to go on for ever, or maybe I just cried with relief, or from sheer exhaustion.

She slept for hours after being born, not even awake to feed or make contact, I guess we were both exhausted after being pushed this way and that by contractions for 36 hours. When I was going for a shower after being stitched up and having a rest, I couldn't stand, I had to be wheeled in a wheelchair to the room where GM, baby and I were to spend our first nights together. I've never known anything like that level of exhaustion, there was simply nothing left of me. Yet pulling the baby to me in her sleep, watching her tiny hands reflexively clutching my index finger at night, it didn't matter that I was too tired to move. She has arrived. And it is true what they say, life will never be the same.

A hatchling!

OK so in this late trend of whirlwind romances and engagements.. I am now pregnant.

I guess I should have figured as much two weeks ago when my breasts became sore and my tummy ached in a weird, dull way without actually producing a period, but since I've considered myself more or less infertile since about the age of 19, I didn't really think much of it.

But a few days ago, I could wake GM with a massive hug, and the message "we are going to be parents." He took it cooly, or at least as calmly as one can expect from a man whom until about two months ago thought he would probably never have a family.

In fact, he has been amazing. For better or worse, I know I have chosen the right man.

Because I have been in two minds.

There are so many cons. We each own a flat, in different cities. We are still students. There is a massive leak in his roof and my student loan allowance won't last forever.

Oh.

And we've been seeing each other for like, six weeks.

This morning GM came home from his night shift to wake me, smelling in his comforting way faintly of cigarettes, coffee and sitting in an uncomfortable chair from dusk till dawn.

He held me. We talked. And I realised that the main reason I am reluctant to have this baby is that I want him to myself. All to myself. I don't want to share him with anyone, not even our child.

I am not sure this will change. OK, so I am crazy in love still, and one is meant to love one's children more than anything as soon as they are born, or maybe even before that.

But I know there are people who grow up knowing that their parents always loved each other more than they loved their kids. I wonder what that is like? Versus growing up, like GM did, with parents not even sharing a bed, or mine, who live together in some weird symbiosis but decidedly not in any sort of romantic love.

He came with me to the doctors to have the pregnancy confirmed. The doctor acted like abortion would not at all be an option and said I was extremely lucky to have fallen pregnant just like that. And I guess I am.

And as my friend, who struggled for ages to conceive and also miscarried once, pointed out that not only am I lucky, I am also over 30 and should be responsible enough to take the consequences of my actions. Which is true. But in itself I don't think it's a reason to have a baby.

We came home from the doctors after going to the supermarket to buy ridiculous amounts of food (may I please emphasise that this extreme nesting behaviour was at the initiative of GM) and made love a 2nd time for the day, then I put GM to bed and had lunch with a friend.

I have thought.

He will always be mine, and always mine alone.

Even if we have a baby, even if things will be chaotic and harder than I can ever imagine (which is what everyone says about having children), he will stand by me no matter what.

So I bought him some flowers and Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. I will wake him now, and tell him that I brought him this not because we are having a baby, but because he is the most amazing man there is, and somehow this has made all my doubts melt away.

Dreams, dreams

GM drives me around to desecrate some midsummer fires. In fact we got up at 0600 in the morning to do it, so my brother now officially thinks we're both nuts.

I woke this morning at 0430 because I had a dream about my ex boyfriend, who was strangely as tall as GM, and who was crying his eyes out because he was sad. Previously to the crying we were watching Kazakh TV together, along with some former colleagues. I felt guilty.

I rolled over, cuddled up to GM, went back to sleep.

At 0645 I woke again, having had a dream where my parents had promised to refurbish some large part of the house, and were telling me in detail just why this could not go ahead as planned. For some reason this made me furious.

I feel weird this morning. Why, I don't know. Last night we had dinner with my brother, it was lovely as always (considering he is a chef I try to invite myself over as often as I possibly can) and I beat him at a Wii Sports Resort game, which is very unusual. Spain won the last quarter final, with David Villa, whom is in the top 5 prettiest players in the World Cup, scoring. It was good.

When we came home, I sat in the windowstill with white curtains billowing around me in the late evening breeze and undressed GM before he carried me off to bed.

So I don't know where all these negative feelings came from. My breasts are feeling tender and my back aches, it could be that my period is coming up. I feel weepy and angry and, well, weepy and angry. I don't know why.

GM is downstairs now, cooking me breakfast, and he is taking me out for a meal later on to commemorate our one month anniversary, which technically speaking was two days ago, but for some reason at the time we agreed it should be today. I guess old shift worker habits die hard, and we like to count full weeks ending on Sundays.

He is the loveliest man. I wake him at 0430, complain of my dream, refuse to tell him what it was about and he holds me and says he is there, now, and that he wants me. Today that just makes me want to cry.

Happiness is...

So I got engaged.

Wait, I'm going to write that one more time.. SO I GOT ENGAGED. In. Real. Life.

Omg, it looks all the more absurd in writing. It is 0617 in the morning and I can't go back to sleep to save my life.

If you want to read about the actual proposal, please skip by clicking here, because a lengthy rant of "how the fuck did you get engaged after less than a month" is to follow first.

I had a strange evening on Wednesday. Our Best Mutual Friend rang up and wanted to have a few beers in the evening. I invited him over. It just so happens he is also best friends with my First Proper Boyfriend, whom I was with when I was 15. Or at least they used to be, they are not as close anymore. FPB has actually finally managed to leave town at the age of thirtysomething, and I guess he has found that he in fact misses BMF, because he also wanted to come along. So did my brother.

Before the guests arrive, as I'm showering, I notice that my breasts are slightly swollen and sore. This is weird, as I have about two periods per year, and the last one was about three weeks ago. I say to GM that I could be pregnant. We google "early signs of pregnancy". We are happy. However, I find this thought too unreal to keep me from drinking. Poor lump of cells that might be down there.

So I am sitting in the beautifully refurbished kitchen of GM (though I guess now I should say "our" kitchen) with these four men: My brother, my lover, my first boyfriend and the man who introduced me to both the latter.

There were beers. There was cheap white wine from FPB, which was so sweet and nasty I had to help him drink it in exhange for a few G&Ts.

Whenever I drink with BMF, I get totally pissed. The last time we did this, in this house in fact, I had a whole bottle of wine to myself plus an unknown number of drinks. I was still trying to be with someone else. But it was here, surrounded by these people, that I had one of the best evenings I'd had in months.

BMF is barely allowed by his wife to go out with me, because one drink tends to turn into several, and we once went out for "one beer" and stayed there until 0400 in the morning when the bar closed.

The weird thing is, when we are together, I never feel drunk. I have known him since we were 10, and he knows everything there is to know about me, which is why I think I never notice that slippery slope from talking about work to talking about your sex life in disturbingly candid detail.

So we sit, we drink, and strangely life seems to have come full circle. BMF approves of me and GM, though he thinks it's weird, but he says, in fact, why should we not be together? He has a lengthy rant about how he thinks GM is smarter than me (in a conventional sense this is clearly bullshit, but no doubt GM would make a far better shrink than I'll ever be once I finish my studies).

FPB and I have a Spotify Battle all evening where FPB interrupts about 4 out of 5 songs I try to play and puts on old music that reminds me of being 15, holding hands, snogging in his basement and spending hours playing video games. Not much different than what I do these days, in fact.

I love FPB. He was an excellent first boyfriend, and since taught me the number one important rule of getting over boys: If they don't want you, they are either stupid or gay. So you probably shouldn't go for them anyway. This was, of course, long before I was with my gay ex and eliminated one of those options. These days I think whomever doesn't want me must simply be stupid. He looks into my heart, straight into it, still. I sort of wish I could have asked him what he thinks of this new relationship, but maybe I will never know. Maybe it's time to make my own decisions.

The evening rolled on. Much important stuff was talked about across the table, most of which doesn't actually matter anymore. But it was important at the time. I sat next to GM, we kissed, we held hands. We behaved. There was no public groping.

I belong with him now. I guess it was a coming out of the closet sort of event. We are now a unit. My closest friends have seen it. I spent the last half hour fashioning rings from beercan ringpulls with a Leatherman, which was no easy task, though I am somewhat unsure of whether this was due to the levels of alcohol in my blood or to the task being impossible to begin with.

Brother had to go home to his wife and kid, FPB and BMF decided to get a cab into town (which is like a 5 minute walk but as I said, there was quite a lot of drinking). I emphasised to GM that if he wanted to go with them, which under normal circumstances I'm sure he would have, I didn't mind, but I personally was fully ready to hit the sack. He insisted on staying home with me, though I think he appreciated the sentiment.

After they had left, about 130 in the morning, I sat on GMs lap in the kitchen, and though part of me wishes I remembered more about what we talked about, I know the central points were such:

• We love each other.
• We want to get married.
• The proposal GM had secretly planned in his head involved whisking me away for a weekend in about six months time, proposing in front of some embassy where he had also secretly booked a slot for us to get married.
• GM has been waiting because it is so soon, and the rest of the world cares about those things.
• GM is slightly drunk (though he insists now that the moment was so sobering he felt sober, he clearly wasn't) and decides he doesn't give a shit what the rest of the world thinks.
• We have never been better than with each other.
• It becomes clear that my passport is not in town, so there will be now impulse-travelling to a romantic location this weekend.
• GM says that this is just as well, as instead, my father will be incredibly proud to walk me down the aisle, my best friend will cry because she's my maid of honor, and my mother will shed tears of joy in the church of my choice.
• Did I mention we love each other?

There was other talk too, kissing, hugging, which escapes me now. He, who never cries, is tearing up, I can see it. We feel emotional. We hug more. Then, GM lifts me up from the chair, and I assume he wants to carry me off to bed, which he does like five times a day (yes, five.. It's nuts, like being 21 again, or possibly even younger, when men had stamina and you thought maybe sex would run out once it was legal).

But he puts me down on the kitchen floor in front of the IKEA fridge with the ice cube dispenser, kneels down closely in front of me, takes my hand and says something I also can't quite remember, but which went along the lines of "I love you. Being with you is so good, I've never had it better. You are the most amazing girlfriend. I want to share the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?"

I completely lose my faculty of speech, which, if you knew me, is pretty rare. Had I been completely sober, I would probably have cried. GM reports later that I looked clearly emotional. I hug him, I kiss his forehead. I manage to say yes, yes, yes, of course I will marry you.

There is more talking, though the only thing I can really remember is that he says we should go look at rings in the morning, and I can have what ever I want. And GM says he also thought that if I really am pregnant, he wanted me to know that he really wants us to be together forever, for me, for us, not just because we are having a baby. This brings me close to tears. He has a last cigarette and we have a pint of water (with ice from the ice dispenser) each. We brush our teeth, I am too dazed to notice that we don't clear the table, which I usually always do after a long evening, somehow we make it to the bedroom. We have sex, we fall asleep.

When I wake, early in the morning, I have no hangover, just a dull sensation that quite a lot of alcohol must have been consumed the evening before. I turn around in bed, and the man I love is there. He will be there, in person or in spirit, every time I wake for the rest of my life. It is an incredibly peaceful feeling to have.

I feel a little anxious that he will regret having popped the question after quite a few drinks, considering he had such grand plans. I feel a little disappointed that I can only remember bits of our pre- and post-proposal conversiation, because it felt important there and then. Though I suspect he remembers his proposal, it was rehearsed in his head over and over before he carried through with it, so even if he was drunk, which of course now he claims he wasn't, he will remember. Maybe one day I will ask.

Then GM wakes too, calls me his fiancee and says he loves me. We want to go into town for rings, but have to make love three times and have breakfast inbetween before we manage to get going. I have no regrets. Maybe he will carry my regrets for the rest of my life, as he does already. I feel lighter.

So we are now engaged. And I have never had it better, either.

I'm dating my guild master

Yes, it's true. Love exists in Azeroth even though the chances of finding it are about 1:11.000.000. But I made it, we made it.

I asked my GM out for a drink. He said yes. I said I liked him. A lot. I told him I was anxious I might change my mind. He said he definitely wouldn't.

I told him I remembered when we first played together a year ago. He said he remembered what I was wearing when we first ran into each other seven years ago. I outfit tested it. He really did remember.

Every time I tell someone where we met, I blush. My mother refers to him as "the gamer" and refused to meet him for several weeks, as she is already lumbered with two addict children and one addict son-in-law. Probably she is wondering where she went wrong with it all. Personally I think she should have let us have an 8-bit Nintendo when we were kids, so we wouldn't have grown to see video games as such a treat.

Obviously now, though, my mum has caved in and met him. She loves him. Everyone does.

And I love him. I love him in a way I have not loved someone since I was 21 and fell head over heels for my gay ex and soulmate. I love him in a way that is whispered in someone's ear at 03.30 in the morning when they are half asleep, in a way that promises that he will never again have to scale back on his expectations of being cared for in order to avoid disappointment.

And to reassure my anxious and recently broken heart, he has confirmed that he will:

• Scale back on smoking when we have children
• Sometimes bite his tongue and watch lame TV with me
• Do half of the housework
• Hold me when I wake at night and I'm scared
• Always kiss me when he returns
• Probably cry when I tell him I'm pregnant
• Propose
• Look me in the eye and still be his own person

He will carry me through life and I will carry his heart that he has given me, that is beating in my chest in return for mine.

He will boost me through every instance, make sure I have all the gems my gear can carry, teach me how to tank and heal, dps race me and tell me I'm great even when he crushes me, he will love me especially because I understand the pleasure of killing a gnome and getting an extra nice cable from Clas Ohlson on a Saturday afternoon.

I will not look back. This is it.

To my rebound crush,

So we have actually spent quite a lot of time together, though I can't remember the time we first met.

I'm tumbling down a slope of falling for you. I don't know if it's serious.

This is what a rebound is I guess, once you are allowed to really experience all those crushes you had to previously suppress, they start blossoming like weeds after a spring shower.

You are lovely, you really are. This whole spring when I've been complaining, whingeing, irritable, erratic, you have given me hugs at every opportunity, you have listened, given constructive advice and loyal support. Even though we barely know each other.

So now I am pouring all my dreams for the future into your cup.

Will you quit smoking if we have children? Will you sometimes bite your tongue and watch lame TV with me? Will you put up with me not talking to you for a day when your football team beats mine? Will you do half of the housework? Will you hold me when I wake at night and I'm scared? When I forgot to get something really important for supper, will you nip out and get it, and kiss me when you return? Will you cry when I tell you I'm pregnant? When you propose, will you look me in the eye and still be your own person?

I am asking so much of you, and who knows, maybe in real life you read the Daily Hate Mail and we have nothing in common. There is only one way to find out, but I don't think I'm ready to try yet. And I'm certainly not ready to break your heart in three months time when I realise that yes, it was just a rebound crush and you were not the cup I should be pouring all those hopes and dreams into.

Because even if you are not the one for me, you are without a doubt one of the nicest people who have crossed my path since I can remember.

Maybe when I come out on the other side, I will tell you this.

I know you will listen.

We kiss

...like children, dry lips, softly.

I sense you next to me in the cinema, we are in the back row, nobody can see us, it is in the daytime but we've sought out the dark. Dust dances in the flickering light just above our heads, suspended in an imaginary road leading somewhere, anywhere.

You are holding my right hand in yours, you look at me and smile, and this is when I kiss you.

I wasn't planning to, not now, but maybe all along, all these years that we have known each other.

I steal that kiss, just as this time is stolen, and we are sitting in the back so that nobody will spot us, we both know this, though neither of us has said so.

We think the same and say it, all the time. But this time, neither of us does. Some things don't bear being reminded about.

And this is why our first kiss is one between two children, because that is what I remember, you as a child, though of course we thought we were adults back then, and we kissed like adults, greedily, blindly.

As you kiss me back, the memory is buried at the back of my dirty laundry, so many garments waiting to be washed, maybe tomorrow, next week, just not right now.

But I find you, the taste of you in my mouth has been somewhere all along, and I am thinking, I could get used to you again.

Sometime soon, the lights will come on and we will go on as if nothing has happened. But I know you are looking at me when you think nobody can see it.

Fallout

It is raining outside today. Large drops falling almost straight, hardly any wind, and the harbor is rippled only by the impact of water on water.

The city is still sleeping, though I hesitate to call it a city, because it is not much more than a town really.

I have thought about whether I feel lonely. Whether I always felt lonely and thereby became a serial monogamist. It is weird. I never planned on having a boyfriend when I was younger. Sure, I liked guys but I've never really liked committment.

And I've never managed to form a relationship form which I got as much or more than I gave. With J and I, I guess we both gave more than we got. Our relationship turned into some kind of vortex that just sucked the life out of us both. The kind you read about in romatic novels, at the beginning, before the heroine realises that actually, the dashing guy next door is her true love. Like the opposite of gestalt theory, the whole is lesser than its parts.

So what am I afraid of? I, who barely know what fear is, unless it slaps me across the face with a fist, which it actually only did once for a brief moment during this last trauma.

My mother, always the pragmatic, told me several times to stop calling people, because she worried that they "would get tired of me". Experience of course showed that people didn't get tired of me, though they probably got used to me showing initiative and therefore rarely rang me first.

And maybe they didn't ring me first because there was something aloof about me, I had no fear. I might say no.

But I remembered my mother's words, and now I am worried of getting in touch with people, even though I do it, I don't feel entirely comfortable with it, except with my few very close friends whom I know I could call at any time of the day and they really would not mind.

Then there is the moving. I have moved around so much that I have never had time to settle into someone's social group. I am always welcome, never expected. Have I moved so much because I was afraid that if I tried to settle in, I wouldn't be accepted? I don't think so. I think this is just what I've had to sacrifice on the altar of my restlessness. Among other things. Though in a sense one could also say that at least they never have time to get tired of me.

So therefore, having a partner was always comforting to me, to my insecurity and partially my laziness.

It is fantastic to always have someone there, someone who will entertain me or that I can engage with my random thoughts about life, someone to have sex with. Sex on tap is extremely underrated, and I can tell I'm getting pretty cranky now though I'm too lazy and still feeling too tender to do anything about it.

I don't actually mind being on my own. I just mind not knowing that someone won't come rushing to my side the second I do.

Remembering

Slowly I am moving out of this numbness that's pretty much constituted all of my emotional life for the last month or so.

I remember what it can be like to wish to wake up in someone elses arms, to actually yearn for social contact with friends, to make playlists in Spotify just because you can.

There should always be an ex to fall back on. Just not the one you just broke up with, obviously.

The insane thing about being in love is the inevitability you start to think applies to you being with the object of your affections. It feels like it must happen to such an extent that you think it will happen. This is clearly delusional, but it is such a lovely flight of fancy, such an incredible high, that it's difficult to resist.

I've stolen enough moments with my "one who got away" that I now remember what it's like. It's a dangerous game, but what is life for, if not for playing...

All time love

Spring has finally arrived, and with it, my all time love. He puts a smile on my face, and I feel seen, heard, validated, in the way I always do when we meet.

I will not act on this, I don't think there is any need to. Our train passed the station a long time ago and for whatever reason we never got on it.

It is simply good to find that I can still fall stupidly in love, that my heart is not broken for ever, that things are fixable.

The fact that I have fallen in love before does not mean my quota of bliss has been spent. Past performance is a guarantee of future income.