It’s been going on for twenty-five years and more. It has looked like an uncommitted relationship, a business partnership, a tentative committment, a friendship, and elsewise. For most of the period, the long piece in the middle, it looked like nothing at all.

That’s not true anymore. It still doesn’t look like much like anything you’d expect. There was a wedding and all a while back. It started out looking normal enough. There was a house, I owned it, and she moved into it. But things didn’t work out that way to stay. She had a job and it sucked. I had one and they took it away. So the house up there sits empty. She got a thing that paid in one town and I got another somewhere else. That’s been the way for a year.

There hasn’t been enough excess to see each other whenever we want. Up until this weekend it had in fact been a too long while, and she let me know it. But it wasn’t all bad by a long shot.

The absences this time have pulled things fonder.

It’s the first time in my life that I’m not holding fire waiting to see if things will work out.

They have.

And as for the future they will continue to. That’s no guarantee of it being pretty or normal or sane or happy all the time. It’s just what is. She’s not letting go and neither am I.