... rain is falling. OK, maybe not rain. More like drizzle as I walk home from Easter Sunday mass to a one-bedroom apartment I share with my girlfriend in Portland, Maine. It's something I never thought possible one year ago.
I moved to Maine less than two months ago, to be with my girlfriend, Rachel. I met her the traditional way -- online, at some random message board talking sports. For six months, we talked about work, lost love, money trouble, whatever came up in our lives. She wrote during the day, I wrote back at night. Not once did we discuss actually swapping phone numbers to chat until mid-summer, when I flew to Washington D.C. for a six-day vacation.
The plan was to take in the capitol with my good friend, Scott, serving as a partial tour guide while letting me sleep on his couch. Turned out that Rachel would be in the area at the same time. We went to see the Nationals one Thursday afternoon, then kissed after we went out to lunch on Friday. It's read like some fairy tale ever since.
We agreed to meet in Chicago, where we fell in love. She visited me on my birthday in Kansas before I flew out to Portland to do likewise. She met my parents, and then I met hers. All the while, we knew we wanted to be together, so I looked out for jobs in the Northeast. And the moment I was lucky enough to stumble into one, I took it, put my house on the market, then drove 2,000-plus miles to finally share my life with someone.
That's how I came to walking home in the drizzle after I sat through a two-hour mass -- was that seriously two hours? -- with Rachel. She drove to work, I walked home, stopping into the Dunkin' Donuts on Congress Street along the way for breakfast. It's a walk that we've done many times since I came here. A few people running, a few people biking. Birds soaring in the sky, between buildings. The cold wind whipping in your face.
The quiet walk home gave me time to think. I used to write for a living, before I gave it up to come here. I kind of missed it, so here I am, writing on a blog that no one's going to read, save for pure chance that they stumbled across it, looking for something else. But I want to write to express myself, like I did every night for six months before I met Rachel, and then every night for the next six months trying to find my way to be with Rachel.
I'll chronicle our trips across the state. You can bet we're going to take advantage of the state parks pass she bought last month. Not only that, but it will be interest to love in a tourist town like Freeport and compare that to Portland life. We move next week -- another reason I chose to savor that walk home from mass today.
Sometimes, it's the simple things that provide the most pleasure.
