Valentine My Valentine

I started this post on Thursday night, but got too sick to finish. I’m behind on my book editing assignment and I really don’t have time to do an update, I’m going to anyway because if I don’t, I may very well forget or decide it’s not important enough. I do the same thing with my book, which I’ve been writing for three years. I’m very tired of putting my book in last place on my priority list, because it never gets done. I’m going to take an editing hiatus after this assignment and work on it a lot. This year is going to be the year I finish my book and start on one of the three follow up ideas I have. For now, you’ll have to settle for what happened on Valentine’s Day.

For those of you first tuning in or newly back after a period away, you might want to read my poll post first, as it addresses the general topic of “astral life and activity.” The consensus was that I should take the plunge and start posting on the subtle level life I have with Meridjet and our kids. We have four, but I’ll get to them later. As my second disclaimer (the first being the poll post), I’d like to end the suspense right here and say, yep, this is gonna be a tale full of clichés, and will make those of you who find romance sickening want to hurl or gag or something, but too f’ing bad. I’m gonna tell it like it was, because he has never done anything like this, except maybe at our wedding (yet another tale). I’m not going to interrupt myself with impulsive embarrassed admissions of “cliché-in-progress,” even though I may fully recognize it will read that way. This is my one admission.

The week before Valentine’s Day, our friend Tim (who visits us on occasion) dropped by, and told me that Meridjet was making plans for Vday, to the tune of “rubbing his hands together with a devious expression.” My trust in this was pretty thin, because traditionally (as I mentioned before), Meridjet has been averse to holidays and especially compulsory gift giving. He used to disappear every single holiday, from Halloween to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, etc. He was occasionally around on New Year’s Eve or Day. When our older son, Alexander, was born in 2005, he began to warm up to the gift giving and particularly Alex’s birthday and Christmas (though it’s purely secular for us), even going so far as to have someone close to the family dress up as Santa. Our twin girls were born in 2006, then Sean in 2007. Each child, and each year, has seen him more and more enthusiastic. He really loves children, and when I got astrally pregnant the second time he confessed that it was his goal to be able to get down on the floor and be literally buried in small children. I put my foot down after Sean, though to be honest I tried that after Alex and after the girls, too.

Anyway, due to his history I was wary. He’s observed Valentine’s Day the past few years, but only in a cursory “buy yourself a stuffed animal of my choosing” way, so I had no reason to expect anything. Besides, I thought, what can he do? There’s no one close enough to us that he could persuade to be his purchasing agent or his artistic commission flunkie, so he was pretty limited. I did, however, promise to reserve Saturday evening for him. We probably have Tim to thank for the fact that I didn’t just absorb into something and ignore any prompts from Meridjet.

Saturday night arrives (switching to present tense seems to occur naturally when I focus on astral, whether it’s dreaming or awake interaction that I’m recounting, so if I lapse into it I hope you’ll forgive me). We get dressed into a close approximation of the clothes I drew in the art post just prior to this post. My corset dress had more white on it than the picture, in a partial checked pattern, but that was really beyond my patience and expertise to draw accurately. I wasn’t able to find the dress or anything really close online, so I had to draw it. It’s just as well; I was overdue for another picture anyway.

He took me to a restaurant that was evidently French (I’ve never been to one in any reality, that I’m aware of, and each of the foods were new to me), where he ordered in French so everything that came was a surprise for me. First there was caviar. I managed to perceive the taste of it, a little. Hard, cold, salty. Then there was something we ate with teeny tiny forks, sort of like fondue forks. I am afraid it was escargot, which squicks me just to think about it. Then there was some duck dish, which I did not pick up the taste of. (I think I shut out tasting once I thought there were snails.) The restaurant seemed familiar but like I said, I’ve no memory of ever eating French food.

After leaving the restaurant, we drove along the coast a while. He pulled into a parking lot just shy of a curve in the road, and we got out. We went down the stairs (west coast facsimile, so down the face of a cliff, basically) to the beach. It was a clear night, and there were a billion stars; oddly, no other people though a quarter of a mile or so down there was a restaurant or bar with loud music we could hear. The moon was waning gibbous, and on a lark I checked the moon phase on my computer and found that it matched. That was affirming.

We took off our shoes, and danced a while. It was blissful. Then we walked down the beach a ways; he was walking backward in front of me. He stumbled and caught himself on one knee. He looked down for a moment, then he said, “I think you dropped this.” Up comes a little black box in his hands. I knew it wasn’t anything like an engagement ring, because I’ve had one of those for a while, but I was still shocked. I took it from him and opened it. It was a ring with two rubies surrounded by a lemniscate (infinity symbol) in silver. The lemniscate has long been a symbol for us, stemming from the day we met, in fact. Maybe sometime I will get around to posting about the history of that sign. The ring is beautiful. I hugged him at length and we murmured things to each other.

We continued down the beach and were not quite to the source of the music when we found a tide pool. He seemed to know it was going to be there. The tide evidently hadn’t been out long, as the sand was still wet. The pool itself was all aglow, with what my mind initially interpreted as glowing caterpillars (like those they used in the movie Pitch Black), but he explained that it was seaweed that was glowing. I’m not sure if there is such a thing as phosphorescent seaweed and I haven’t checked on it yet, but it was most intriguing and allowed us to view the few small fish in the pool. We sat on a rock a while. I asked him where we were (which really was pointless; every time I’ve tried to get him to pinpoint the city we live in, he says there’s no real counterpart here; I’ve always known in some way it was in or near Los Angeles), and he said, “Malibu.” It seemed very sparsely built for a popular beach area, but I’ve never been there so I have no idea if “our” Malibu is anything like “real” Malibu. From where we sat I could see a jetty into the water and across the water a few miles away I could see a few lights and a darker shape indicating land. *shrugs* I’ll need to check into all this.

We got up after a bit and walked down to the restaurant-bar place from whence the music came, and we climbed their stairs to a deck. Not many people were outside; it was breezy and getting cold. The building and decking were made of natural cedar; it smelled good. We went inside, where he was greeted by various people who included me in the greeting (presumably we’d been there before and it was the type of place that had a regular crowd). We sat at the bar and had champagne. Then we walked down to the parking lot to the car; it explained that this was the “overflow parking lot” for the establishment we’d just left. I didn’t catch the name, but reaching for it now I get something Irish, like “O’Malley’s” or similar.

We drove home, which took us into the hills for those keeping score. lol. We entered the house and all was quiet, the kids asleep. (They have a sort of “nanny” who lives in but is essentially one of the family more than anything remotely like a servant. He’s also male. ) I smelled a fresh, crisp, floral scent and found a big bunch of potted tulips on the breakfast bar. I’d been admiring some at Sam’s Club a week or two back. When we went into the bedroom, there were roses on the bedside table and one single long-stemmed rose on my pillow.

And that’s all you need to know about that! lol. I got all of this in sections over the evening, starting around 10 pm my time. Every time I got distracted by real life™, when I went back I’d never missed anything of consequence (that I know of!). I still didn’t get every second of time; for instance, most of the time spent in the bar is blank. But it was a magical night, in spite of the blank spots. I’m deeply honored, for lack of a better word, at the effort he put into this night, and admittedly confused as to what inspired it all of a sudden, but I’m counting my blessings and just loving him as hard as I can.

Finis!