MIRROR IMAGES...

The Snowman wrote his wife:

It is our relationship that set the bar so high when I went in search of your mirror image in male form. But you really have no equal of any sex...

When I read this, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I realized for the first time why, in whale mode, I had fallen so far, so fast toward the "alien planet" that was Piggo. How could I not have seen that I was responding to someone who had all the best qualities of my wife [devotion religious and personal, gravity and levity in wondrous balance, thoughtfulness and mindfulness, concern and discernment], with the possible exception of beauty, which suddenly seemed immaterial. [Who knows what he looks like? I was certainly past caring.]

But the Snowman has his finger on my pulse: it was everything I didn't want to lose, plus the one thing I wanted to gain, and oh, how clear it seemed that all the folds and wrinkles and kinks would align like nesting spoons... Now, as the Wachowsky Brothers might say, I was living in a dream world, Neo, or at least was battering down the door to get into one; I was in real danger of picking the wrong color pill and waking up in a nightmare -- hence the panic that ensued, along with the Natural Born Dyke thing of figuring out how I could fit in around his life in a more giving and surrendering way than I have ever really contemplated with my wife, who was always expected, on some level, to fit around mine...

And the power of that attraction remains. Even though I now understand what I was doing blindly, it remains compelling. For the simple reason that my fall followed the first inkling that it might be possible to find another person out there in the Big, Bad, Cruel World, who could love me as much, put up with as much, offer as much... One of the major Reality Checks I have kept coming back to is that the chances of being struck by such lightning twice in one lifetime seem incredibly, not to say impossibly, remote. But if there were a chance?

Well, that's not a promise I can seek or anything I can hope to know. My decision has to be completely "free", which in this case means without hope of compensation... I must work out my salvation in fear and trembling -- I may not be working much out at the moment, but I am certainly in fear and certainly trembling -- I can only put my life in a larger pair of hands than mine, and pray that I will have eyes to see the path he shows me.

My wife's best friend has been "told", and she is coming to visit. MWBF, call her Roz, has been a rock, always there for my wife, always willing to drive incredible distances to share lunch, coffee, reminiscences of their earlier lives in The City, the trials of their lives since, offering the comfort of a truly open and understanding ear. But... while she has been a good friend to me, and has, I'm sure, defended me much in the past, she has also minced no words when she thought I was going overboard, astray, or to hell in a handcart. Though the chance of the kind of laughter we have shared in the past seems less likely all the time, I am delighted she is coming, but also terrified. A loving judge is still a judge; and the condemned must still tremble before a loving judge's verdict.

Pray for me.
And stay with me.