I've had a lot of time this weekend to study Jacob while he's awake and while he's asleep. Maybe it's because I'm spending a lot of time sitting and listening or just thinking or being caught-up on sleep and awake early in the mornings. I have more time to watch him, to enjoy how he does things, or listen to his words. A passive, undetected observer of a phenomenal man.
Part of what has always drawn me to Jacob is the conviction with which he talks, how he says what's on his mind, exactly what he feels, without any fear of reprisal or reproach. He just lets it out, he always has and it's beautiful. He has a way of putting things into a perspective that can gild ashes and turn sand into castles. It's rapturific.
Instead of keeping his mouth shut a million years ago he simply smiled at me in that pained way he gets and he said I love you. I think you should be with me. Even though I was already married. He didn't care, he was telling me how he felt.
This weekend I listened as he told Lisabeth a bit of our history, how he fell in love with me in one night and then we settled into being close friends with a remarkable tension that smothered us alive and it was a long, arduous test with spectacular results, because being able to marry his best friend has been his greatest joy. He regarded me with pride and I was digging my nails into my hands to prevent the unpreventable tears he moved me to.
Call it a love-in, call it cheesy, he's absolutely right. It is the most amazing feeling in the world to marry someone you know so well, having gotten to know them in a personal sense with a closeness free of the romantic attachments, free of the expectations of being in love. Oh, shoot, I know we were in love anyway, I know it wasn't fair to Cole and I know we teetered on the edge of right and wrong, taking turns waiting for each other to slip so we could make our very own oops-moments. I know he wanted me. I know I wanted him and I also know that we made incredibly good friends too, and that's what we fall back on when sometimes we suffocate each other with the love part.
We could steal each other's popcorn at the movies without asking, he's always given me his corduroy jacket before I told him I was cold, we'd feel like skating or going to the bookstore at the same times when no one else would. I knew all the foods he liked and all of his embarrassing teenage secrets. He knew of my still-raging unrequited teacher-crush from junior high, my fear of live lobsters and secret fear of heights and he was one of the few people I ever told that I was being hurt.
All of this gives us our foundation in a new marriage where we thought we were starting on the first block and had nothing to fall back on. We keep forgetting but not forgetting, if it makes any sense at all, how well we do know each other and how caring for each other as friends has made us slower to take offense and harder to rile as lovers.
We've learned to argue, at last. Just in the past two days, finally. Somehow. My God.
Jacob has just about caught up on his own sleep, finally letting go of his penchant for lying awake at night gazing at me with loving worry while I slumber carelessly in his arms. Aware of his concern every waking moment but right now my sleep is of the dead variety. Hard and long, drugged and stupefied. With vividly fucked-up dreams and nightmares I wouldn't wish on people who most definitely deserve them. When I wake up he's there, murmuring his shushes with his lips on my skin, arms keeping me safe and grounded on earth with no danger of bad thoughts carrying me away. Not complaining or deferring when I want more than a hush from his lips, when our needs take over us again and again.
By being my friend, Jacob knows without a doubt not to take it personally that I have issues about wanting to be on earth. Issues with knowing how to grieve, issues with change and issues with him having to coexist in the headspace I occupy. It's a tall order and of everyone I have ever known he would be the one I choose, because he is so strong. Because he tells me how he feels. He has never done that with anyone other than me and it means something incredible.
And watching him sleep, shower and make love to me gives me an appreciation for and a thorough thrill fed by a decade of coveting his magnificent body, since I had already captured his heart and his mind. His muscles were the icing on the cake, if icing came in packs of eight.
Being in love with Jacob is an endless gift. Not only because he can support my entire weight in the palm of one of his hands but that he can support my soul with the strength of his heart, a visible feat since he wears it on his sleeve for me and I carry it safely with me when I leave his arms.
Sitting beside him while he speaks of his love for me, occasionally raising my hand in his to kiss it or playing with my earring, I can hear it, I can see it and I feel it. It's captivating, having moved several of our friends into appreciative silence over the past few days.
I let him in, finally. I trust him. I told him everything I've been keeping from him, in some misguided fashion to make myself appear better to him in hopes that I would be worthy of him. Instead I had left him with questions that made me seem unworthy and now those questions are gone and he sees me. All of Bridget. Everything, good and bad and painful and difficult and wonderful and he's still here and still in love and confirmed as a permanent fixture. Cogs I left in our gears out of fear that were destructive have been removed, and he sees all of me now.
He told me that all of it would have helped if I had just gotten it out sooner, and he was concerned that I would willingly make myself out to be a monster when I clearly wasn't one, for his benefit. Touched that I wanted to be perfect in his eyes when he tells me I have been nothing but perfect, always and forever to him. He's relieved, again, that the rest of my past is on the table because it's one step closer to our future, our own history with our own memories, none of which are stolen or forbidden or the least bit disgraceful.
Okay, maybe some of them will be disgraceful but that's sanctioned disgrace. Because I married him, after all. And somehow I fell in love with him all over again, just now.
And the thing where he traces his thumb along my bottom lip? He still does it, possibly at least once every day or so, and it still knocks me fucking flat. Breathless.
