Love Hurts

Tuesday night I drove to Arlington to meet some friends as we said goodbye to a friend and his wife who were getting ready to move out of the country for a few years.  I had thought his wife, originally from Germany with most of her family still living there, would be excited to return to her homeland, but she really wasn’t that stoked.  She’s leaving the home she had built in that island paradise of Hawaii, a career that she enjoyed, and moving without knowing where or even if she was going to find a job, a place to live, or a plan for what happens next all because her husband had a great opportunity and really wanted to go.

With an intro like that, you’re probably thinking that this blog is going to be all about the things that people are willing to give up for love.  But since this is my blog, it’s actually about what happened before I made it to that dinner.  I have said in previous posts that I was so over DW it wasn’t funny.  Well, sadly I have proven that untrue as the mere mention of his name and wonderfulness by a neighbor riled me up so much that I twisted my ankle and busted my knee. 

Rewind to Tuesday post work.  I hauled butt home to walk my faithful canine before driving across town to say goodbye.  Just a block from my home I see a neighbor with a new dog.  I didn’t know her too well – she lives on the other side of DW and she and I had never really talked too much.  But she was nervous about her new dog, and seemed anxious to chat.  So we let our dogs meet each other and they got along really well, so well in fact that she felt she had to comment about how embarrassed she was as her dog had not liked DW’s dog and had in fact snapped at him, and wasn’t that horrible as DW is just the nicest guy ever, don’t I agree? GAH!!! She literally went on and on about what a great guy he is, and how fantastic his dog is, yadda yadda.  And I found myself agreeing with her and then getting a little melancholy about why he has now decided to seemingly ignore me and pretend that we never hung out or went on our was-it-a-date-or-was-it-not-a-date.

After leaving her, I was muttering somewhat angrily and not paying attention to where I was walking and I tripped on the curb, twisted my left ankle, heard a disturbing snap, and busted open my right knee.  Really not ideal for someone who was attempting to train for a half-marathon and had just found out that she probably has plantar fasciitis in her right foot.  So I hobbled around for the rest of the walk, trying not to bloody up my new dress, hurrying home to ice my ankle, and get out the door before I totally missed the going away dinner. 

But the dinner itself was pretty great.  A little bittersweet as the few of us that gathered together have known each other for a long while but haven’t really spent time with one another for many years and to get together to say goodbye when you’re not sure when you’ll see each other next, is a little sad.  The stories and times we share are wonderful, but in the past.  The memories caramelize and you start thinking of them as the “good ol’ days,” which is totally oversimplifying what happened and the decisions we made.  But it’s nice to stroll down memory lane, even if you’re hobbling a little from all your multiple foot injuries.

I drove home thinking about how our lives had diverged and how everyone had seemed to keep growing and changing, while I felt a little like I was stuck in a repeat episode of some of the less fun times of the Diary of Bridget Jones.   That all changed when I got home to the ecstatic waggingness of my four-legged soulmate.  He was ecstatic to see me even though I had been gone most of the day and was definitely not as mobile as he would have preferred.  When I bent down to hug him, he did that doggy sigh thing, like he was saying, “you are the bestest person ever and I couldn’t be happier.”  So yes, love hurts and crushes bruise, but love also heals and makes you happy to be you, realizing how lucky you are with the love and the life that you have, even if it’s different than what you had planned.