Pool Daze

It’s just before the Fourth of July and we sit by the pool of our new apartment on what can only be described as a perfect Sunday afternoon. He plays Sam Cook on his portable speaker that lays underneath my tank top so it doesn’t overheat from the sun. He gently allowed himself to get into the pool to cool off. And for the first time I notice the light brown color to his hair when the sun lands on it. I watch him behind the book I’ve just started as he swims to the other end of the pool. This is a man I’ve known for four years. He is always making jokes, whether it be to get others to laugh or to take my bad mood or make my sadness go away, he has come to be the most important man in my life. If you know me, you know that’s hard to say with having four older brothers and nothing but nephews. 

Four years ago, unfortunately, I had just exited a relationship with a selfish man who held us both in an unhappy home. To steer clear of an argument, or worse, another silent treatment, I would escape down to the pool, where I happened to meet all of my closest friends in Tennessee. When I met this guy I speak of, he was just my friends roommate. He was just some beautiful, but charming fella who captured my eyes for a short period of time. 

As time went on, this gentleman that was such a good friend to my friend, started making himself more present in my world. We went to movies, stargazing out at the lake till morning, and he would even bring me Chipotle for lunch at work. I had to lay low with him because the last thing I wanted was to ruin a friendship with my girlfriend. Not to mention my lack of trust and realistic want for a relationship at the time. 

Fast forward a year and I moved home, let’s say due to unforeseen circumstances. From time to time I’d receive a text saying hello or a picture of his Chipotle lunch saying he wished I was there. Never did I think that he really meant it. At this point in time I had lost my oldest brother and was living back in Ohio with my parents aiding in the care of my ailing mother. Something I never knew until recent months that he understood so vividly. 

Just seven short months later, my mother was gone, I was losing my mind deep down, and I got away for a weekend back to Tennessee where he reappeared to not only make me laugh once more but sit by my side. I think he knew I was broken and all he wanted to do was hold the pieces as they continuously fell from my mind, body, and soul. He spent much of the weekend just talking to me. Something I will never forget. Something I needed. He showed me a clearer way of thinking. Something he continues to teach me today. 

I was in Ohio for three years and three months. In this time I reconnected with my dad, brothers and sister in laws on a level I never reached with them before. I gained the friends my soul has been searching for for years and I let go of the ones who wore me down to the negative I hated in me. After two years of very minimal contact with him, it was thanksgiving of 2017 and he just blew up my phone like a firework all over again. 

Conversations for hours through text that tell me he’s no longer living in Nashville, but rather a mountain man in Colorado. He tells me about his job, his friends, the life he's been living over the last 4 years. Most importantly, he is constantly telling me how much I’d love it there. 

When I was 21, I worked for a beauty pageant that allowed me to travel the country for about a year and a half. I bailed on my own opportunity to visit Denver then because the weekend it fell on was my 21st birthday and I had plans with family, friends, and coworkers already.  Colorado was a place my mother always spoke of visiting. A place she found so much beauty and love because of friends that resided there. She wasn’t disappointed that I passed it up when I was younger, but I know she wished I would have gone. 

Flash forward ten years and I was sitting on a plane to visit him. A bundle of nerves. A mix of emotions in my heart and stomach. After four or five months of texts and FaceTime conversations, it was time to be face to face. It was time to see the man I once knew in Nashville. The man who could have had me fall so fast but my heart and head resisted. 

We visited each other three times for short weekends over a span of the three following months. I went back to Colorado in May for a brief weekend where it was decided that we were done with the distance. That it was time. By the end of that month my condo that I had purchased only a year and a half prior was on the market and sold in just six hours of being listed. Quickly after, all arrangements were made to leave my job and pack my life up to head out west. 

Skip ahead to this wonderful day where I sit in a daze by the pool, we enjoy cocktails by the pool, and I can’t imagine my life another way. I can’t pretend that I could be happier with another human in my life. I have found the most selfless, caring, and loving human being that in his words just “wants to take care of” me. We have a beautiful apartment ten miles from Boulder, just outside Denver. 

If you would have asked me four years ago if I would move across the country to spend my life with this man, I’d have told you no, in all honesty. He snuck up on me when I wasn’t expecting him to. He has become everything I have ever wanted. I just never knew it!