On the passage of time and love

It's midsummer. The crickets have started chirping in the evenings and the nights are perceptibly shorter. When I drive through the country, the farmers are harvesting wheat, cutting their second hay and there is local corn at road-side stands. Where has the summer gone? Where has the time gone? In 25 days, I'll celebrate my 34th birthday. Many of my friends, if not most, are in long-term committed relationships, as am I, and probably half of them have children. I am measuring time in the growth of babies and the long periods between visits. It feels like yesterday that I was preparing to go off to my internship in Winnipeg, but it was six years ago.

Six years ago, Rick and I broke up. He'll be marrying his longtime girlfriend this Hallowe'en. I won't be attending, I guess. He once told me that he thought it would be weird to have an ex at a wedding, even if they got along. I have no reason to expect an invitation, but it makes me a bit sad I won't be invited. Six years ago, I met Gareth. Not long after, I had fallen completely and utterly in love with him. Five years on and he's not talking to me. His new girlfriend, I guess, feels threatened by me, despite an ocean between us. His family have told me that it's not just me, though, it's everyone. Since meeting her and especially since they moved in together in the spring, he's cut everyone out.

I was looking at Gareth's old deviantArt gallery, which he hasn't updated since 2006 when we were headily in love and full of dreams and wishful thinking. He had a passion and a drive then, which he's all but abandoned. What happened to his determination to make films? He's working for an insurance firm. I don't know. I mustn't judge. But it's certainly easier to cut off the people you love than have to examine your life and what they may represent, I guess. It's sad, I think. There was so much going on in his head when I met him, so much creative energy desperate for an outlet. I won't blame it on his girlfriend, it's not her fault. He was losing himself before he met her, but now all of his closest friends and family have lost him. Looking at his old gallery was like looking at the digital traces of a dead person, archived forever on the Internet.

In October, three years will have passed since I met Glenn. Glenn, who I took a chance on, because we both had relationship baggage. I didn't expect to love again after Gareth. I hoped, at best, to fill a void and to find a measure of comfort and satisfaction. We joked about my fear of commitment, yet I suggested we move in, I pushed for it to happen despite a long held fear of co-habitation. I forgive his foibles and love his cat. I push him and take him out of his comfort zones the same way he helps ground me and keep me from floating off. I am extremely lucky to have learned that, indeed, I could love again, and completely. Glenn is a deep, still water, difficult to fathom while apparently simple of need and desire. Nearly three years on and I am still learning new things about him. He isn't always easy to like, because there's a broodiness to him and he encircles himself in walls built of his own melancholy thoughts, but the love, support, humour, kindness and strength he possesses and shares with me makes a more than even trade. He adores me in a gentle way, never overbearing or smothering, just always there. I love him very, very much. I am lucky and I am grateful.

Now, if he'd only just get off the pot.