Plan E: Love, Laws, and the Art of Not Falling Apart.

It’s been a funny old year – a funny old life, really. Not funny ha-ha, except if you count the jokes on me, I suppose. No, more funny—tumultuous, weird. Strange, by and large. Though there were laughs along the way. Each and every byway and all that. And a shit ton of tears, of course. What to say? When I feel, I feel it hard. I’ve spent most of my life in a state of sucker punched.

Last year was much like any other. Life had lost its shine a long time ago, and I was numb from the battle. Tired. I was meandering aimlessly in a state of somnambulant existence. Single, surviving, hardly thriving. Working to numb the nothing and thinking little of futures or dreams. Thoughts of another half—a relationship beyond the three moggies—were as far removed as winning the lottery without buying a ticket.

I am not a gambler. More of an accidental stumbler. Shit just kind of happens – a fall, a trip, and I wake up wherever the wind takes me. It is, in part, the reckless abandon that comes with defeat and perhaps the last sliver of hope that something more than this life exists beyond the confines of place. Whatever it is, it has traipsed around the world and back again. Never quite settling anywhere long enough to get hurt.

And so it was through another happenstance adventure – River. The marriage part—love. Saying I do. The navigating long distance and major operations. All of it was so very easy. I had found my person. The one who made it all make sense. Made me make sense. It was as if my whole life had been building up to them. I had to be ready. Prepared. Grown, as it were. And I was. Ready. It was all so very easy.

The logistics. The bureaucracy. The bullshit, on the other hand, was not.

After our ‘I do’s, we hopped on a Norse Air (Never again. But that is a tale for another day) to Blighty. The world capital of rain, wind, insidious damp, and frankly, mostly miserable middle-aged dudes (not surprising, really; they’ve spent most of their lives being convinced that they are the Anglo-Saxon saviours of the modern world but have been freezing and poor in their dank, terraced caves for their whole lives. Realization sucks.)

I’d warned River about the cold and damp—but you don’t know what you don’t know. Until you do.

The relentlessness of the weather, however, did little to dampen our excitement or stem our rose-tinted hope for the future. Not the rain. Not the damp. Not the various grouchy beings in proximity. No. Not the clogged drain, not the hobbit-sized house. Not even my family. Nothing.

Except, of course, for the paperwork. And the money. Google neglected to mention that we would have to take out a bank loan to pay the impossibly high fee for application without any guarantee that we would be accepted. Lawyers even advised us against it. And hell, where there’s a buck, there’s a legal eagle waiting to descend on its prey. We concluded we needed a plan. Forward. Plan E.

I did what I do best. Fall, trip, and wander the fuck into whatever’s next.

We would have to move.

Eureka.

So simple.

Except, being of the queer variety—not quite as simple as a meerkat would have you believe.

Something I’ve never had to think about in my cartwheeling little life. Pack a suitcase, grab the paws, and go. Easy. Except now, in this new wonderland we’ve been building, far from the Underland of my past, we are trouble. A problem. I’ve never been a problem before. A silent nobody. Off-grid. Off the radar. No red flags.

Our love, apparently, is an offense—and offensive in the highest order to the majority of the world. Pick the wrong spot, and we could be imprisoned indefinitely (though, in fairness, we might still get to be together—so still a possible on the list of possibles), or worse still, stoned to death publicly—which seemed a bit risky, to be fair.

An odd and sobering realization descended on my newly queer brain.

Huh.

How utterly sad that this delicate, beautiful bond we share—this gift of ours—could be so triggering to so many. Such a disproportionate amount of hate for such an overwhelming amount of love.

I wonder why they care so much. I spend nights wondering why - why it matters to anyone at all. And not just that, but truly—how is it possible that people can be so arrogant as to think they know so absolutely how life should be and what love means to who?

So, armed with a heavy heart and a will-not-be-maimed list of potential new pastures, I set about applying for jobs. Application after application, interview after interview, and all the while, the pit in my stomach deepening as the thought of being apart dug deeper into me.

Finally, we got what we’d been longing for—a job. In Thailand. Not just that, but a job in Thailand that will sponsor River as my legal spouse. My wife.

And now we wait, safe in the knowledge that apart is—and never will be—a possibility.

Suffice to say, our sincere and heartfelt apologies for our recent Vocal absenteeism, but we’ve been slightly otherwise engaged, plotting our fate on a map of which there are tragically few pins.

Don’t get me wrong—I am not immune to the irony of the privilege I have just because I was burped out into an English-speaking country. By nothing I have done, I have innate value. Wares to sell and a market willing to pay it. All because of the bastardly behavior of my ancestors. Well, not mine exactly. I’m Welsh. But still, I benefit from the evil of other people. I get it. Don’t like it much, but hell, I have a mortgage to pay and nothing much else to offer the world.

I get it. I am lucky.

But privileged or not, love should not be defined by a statute created by those intent on pushing their own experiences onto everyone else.

Just live and love. And let live.

C x

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There are three things we know

1. If we want to live in the US or the UK we will have to spend a significant time apart

2. We can find a third country (safe for queer folks more on that later) that will sponsor me as a spouse if Celia comes and works at a school there.

3. #1 is not an option.

We've spent too much time apart already we are too old and too cynical to separate again. So, it's option number two, of course. Now I am not a particularly adventurous person by nature. Before getting married I had barely left New Jersey. I've always been too scared, too stuck, too comfortable to travel the world. Hell, forget New Jersey I barely left my house for years. My wife on the other hand "fucks off at the first chance I can get" it's something I very much admire about her. She is magnificent. Though I do understand more now that I've experienced a UK winter.

When we figured out immigration to our respective countries was going to be prohibitively expensive and near impossible (for many reasons) and would involve more time apart, we decided on the third route of finding a country that we could go to and teach. Celia with many years of experience, me with a TEFL, a BFA and some misplaced confidence. So first things first, which of the 34 countries that recognize gay marriage would we be headed to? Celia has spent time in Asia and loved it, I am well over western garbage, and Thailand just recognized gay marriage. Seemed like a win win win situation. It took longer than that to whittle it down, we looked all over the world including some places where gay marriage was not recognized but would be easy enough for me to get a job with just a TEFL and therefore visa sponsorship would not be a problem. In the end my fear of "no legal protections" won out over the ease of job getting and a relatively large salary. It's strange to think that this love is not recognized in more than half the world.

Of course, after we had decided where we were going Celia had to go through the horrible experience of interviews and waiting for schools to get back to her. While I am waiting not so patiently to know where I should start applying. The funny thing is through all that stress was so much beauty, and love. Mostly love. We hunkered down from the cold and rain, emailing and waiting, listening to recruiters tell us things they'd never follow through on. And in between, we intertwined our lives. Pretty simply and beautifully. When we said "I do" we meant it and the amount of stress that's existed since we figured out just how complicated it was to get a visa, probably would have snapped a less solid relationship. All it did was make us more stubborn to make it work elsewhere.

So, Thailand. We got the email after three long weeks of waiting for the school (there was the official deadline, then half term, then waiting on the head teacher it was like pulling teeth). We hopped on a train to Cardiff for a night away, which happened to coincide with the first two days in a row without rain. The universe might secretly be rooting for us. We're staunch atheists, but the coincidences stacking up suggest otherwise. And yeah, sorry for dropping off the radar—things have been hectic, to say the least. We're still here chugging away, watching trash TV and hanging with the cats in between plotting to move across the world for adventure and also for love.

Mostly for love.

Live. Love. And let live. Always.

R x