Becoming Human

Seeing you step off the sidewalk at the airport was one of the best moments of my life, I didn't know how I was going to handle it until then, but there you were, real, after literal months worth of talking to each other through a screen you were standing there in front of me. Those few weeks are a blur, I woke up out of surgery just wanting to see you, and when you walked in with a stuffed axolotl we later named Kimchi my nervous system calmed down. I was finally in a body that felt right, and you were there to share it with me. That first night the pain was unbearable, I was shaking and scared and I looked at you and begged you not to leave my side. Of course you didn't, and wouldn't have, but the comfort that you brought was more than I imagined. More comfort than any pill I was given, more peace than most times of my life. I thought I was going to be doing the healing part alone. I was not alone.

Now gentle, passionate, and kind love is really difficult to find. We found it in each other and through that we both started to heal wounds that were long forgotten about. If I could list the things I've learned from loving you they would go on forever, it would be pages and pages of how I've become braver, how you and I just fit. I don't think the lesson here is love heals all wounds because it does not, however it does make impossible things quite a bit less impossible. The thing about boiling down the lesson of this year is that a good portion of it took place in such an open and vulnerable and frankly scary place that it's incredibly difficult to put into words. Usually not one to hold back on words I find this almost too personal to share with the world. It seems simple, a love story, two souls, on opposite ends of the world, it could be a work of fiction if I wasn't living it. It would be easier to write if it were fiction though, real life is messy. Human. Words are what we do though, so why is it so hard? The lessons of the past year are a vast boiling ocean of good and bad, ugly and beautiful. How do we begin to pick apart the humanity that was the last year, humanity is messy and therefore the lessons of our most human year are the same. I suppose, the lesson, the many lessons, boil down to how much can change in a year. How one little decision and then a series of progressively bigger decisions can make a life unrecognizable in wonderful and confusing ways in a year. It is not a long time, and yet it is eons in what can change. I left my country, I fell in ridiculous intense love, I got married to said love, I opened up my heart in ways I didn't think I was capable. I've become softer, more honest, more sensitive, more protective. All of those little lessons came together for my most human year.

I watch you sleeping. Breath deep and unrelenting. I wonder in the darkness how you will feel in the morning. Whether the pain was worth it. And then I think of all the pain you must have endured to do this to yourself. As if you ever had a choice. You only ever wanted to be the real you. The ‘you’, you felt on the inside matched on the outside. God dammit you deserve at least that. I don’t fully understand it all, how it must have felt. How can I? But luckily for me I don’t have to, the only thing I have to do is be here.

Watching you in that moment, I knew without any doubt, without any hesitation that I loved you.

I didn’t travel 3000 odd miles for romance. There was nothing remotely romantic about this journey. There would be blood and bruises and tears. Hospitals. I knew that. Researched what it would be like extensively before I mentioned it. Before I committed. But the thought of you enduring alone and in pain propelled me forward. I couldn’t bear it. The weight of it was heavy and clung low in my chest, threatening to engulf me.

No, it was hardly an ideal first meeting face to face – unconventional at best. Pure insanity at worst, but it didn’t matter.

But here, in the early hours of a Thursday morning, sleep deprived and watching your blood drip-drip-drip into the plastic bag pinned to your bandages, I know that this is the only place I’d rather be. Here, with you through this and whatever else comes next.

So, this year I learned that love exists. Oh and I guess I also learned that I’m gay, maybe. I don’t know. What does it matter? And why?

Together, through honesty and trust, we learned more about our individual selves. We learned that neither of us are nor can be perfect. No matter how hard we try. And slowly, we are learning how to balance each other and ourselves. How to let go and be freer. We learned that hardship and pain can be beautiful – and sometimes it can just be hardship and pain. That there is great kindness to be found in strangers and those you love and expect to love you in return, don’t always show up in the ways we wished. But that’s OK. Together we’ve got whatever comes next. And for now, there is more future in front of us together than lays behind us individually. If this last year taught us that love lies not in the grand gestures and the romance but in the steadfast simplicity of being there and present for each other – this next year is spread before us in a vast expanse of opportunity and potential pitfalls. And hand in we are ready to step on to our new road. Wherever that may lead.