Marry Me (Most Things Usually Are)

“You’re not Gandalf, this isn’t Middle Earth and I don’t need a life lesson right now,” I sputter in furry as I recap the events that have led to my professional demise. Being brilliant is tough—take my word for it—and it isn’t exactly rare for it to be thrown back in your face. I feel Van Gogh's plight, is what I’m getting at.

I got fired from my job as a junior art instructor today. This leaves me in the same state of professional disarray I was in a year ago when I met Sherman in the forest we shared with my Hyundai and a gaggle of blue jays. Fortunately, I have moved up from being homeless to being a free-loader, since we now live together.

A normal person’s reaction to this might be to critique my professional candour—some may say “abrasiveness”—or to make some crude derailment joke, wherein my life-choices are accurately compared to a train that has not been able to manouver a straight stretch of track. Sherman isn’t like that though. He is also a polar bear, which works out well, since we live in the arctic.

“Well, I’ve been wanting to spend more time with you anyway,” he smiles. “I get lonely when you’re not around.” Sherman does some sort of engineering that he can do from home. I never really paid too much attention to that sort of thing. Peoples’ jobs bore me more than my supervisor’s life advice.

Such a comment would make me want to throw-up in my mouth; but, coming from Sherman, it just sounds different. It's the kind of thing I have come to expect from him: perfection really, at least as I see it. It isn’t pandering to my ego or patronizing my inefficiencies (of which there are many). It’s just honestly, earnestly, Sherman.

“Sherman,” I smile—the tears seemingly removing the ache from lines so conspicuously etched into my previously troubled faced over years of uncertainty—feeling a new, comfortable, calm wash over me. I’ve never understood most peoples’ inability to enjoy the phases of their lives for what they are, while they are. Instead, for the most part, we think forward in hope, or backward in rumination, or, sometimes, all around and nowhere at all, simultaneously; but, it seems a rare human eccentricity to be able to live through an experience like this without fretting the fear of its end or wishing through it in a desire for something more. “I love you.”

I take the ring from my pocket. With neither fumble of hand nor hesitation of heart, I trace the silver circle with my index and pinky fingers, only now fully realizing the syrupy symbolism of the circle as a signifier for completion. The notion makes me sad for stupid people around the world. Sherman doesn’t complete me. We don’t even complete each other. What he does is make me feel safe in a world that I never knew people could feel comfortable in, let alone secure or limitless. I’ll never know what I truly mean to him, but I suspect I make him laugh and happy, and perhaps feel loved for parts of himself that he thought were unlovable. If not, that makes us different.

If he catches the eye of that bitchy blue jay who lives in our summer home and wreaks of Benadryl or runs-off with one of the slutty squirrels from our former book club, this experience will still have as much meaning to me as it will if it leads to forty years of me breaking bread with his relatives here in the Arctic. Either way, he took hold of my heart and my self and he moved the mountains and shook everything up. What was left was new and different and exciting to me.

 I think my secret fear—going back as far as I can remember; perhaps even farther than that—was waking up one morning and realizing that I had missed my life. A few things got in the way of my doing that. I got really sick once, which probably shook me free of a lot of my old societal expectations, but around the same time that I was lost and alone I met a bear, in a forest, and I fell in love with all the possibility I had forgotten to learn might exist beyond what I used to think was a fixed, unshakable, interpretation of the world. Inching free of that has been trepid and exuberating and unbelievably enchanting all at the same time.

Sherman was a big part of helping me see the world that way. I guess that’s worth, as they say, putting a ring on it for. Besides, he doesn't snore. That's a plus in my books.

“I’m not old. As it turns out, I’m not even broken,” I begin, trying ever so unsuccessfully to put my inner thoughts into words. “With expiry dates lifted, you seem to want to stick around anyway. If you’re still not smart enough to run into the tundra right now, I’d like to share my secret life with you.”

He looks at me with a puzzled expression. He usually breaks this out when I do, or say, something stupid, so I’ve gotten pretty used to this particular contortion of his face. Whether that makes us more like Batman and Robin or Mr. and Mrs. Smith makes no difference to me, which I suspect means that regardless of how this plays out, our life together will change very little.

I don’t get the whole fuss over marriage, the whole sanctity of it anyway. Not even a hundred years ago it was no more than a property transaction. One man taking ownership of one woman yes; but, not a very romantic notion, and certainly not the horse I would think otherwise rational people would so confidently hitch the wagon of their sensibilities to.

It’s argued that gay marriage will lead to other things. Subversive things. Like, a sudden joy in alien-sponsored anal-probes or a spontaneous craze in bedding-down with your own mother. I find that argument kind of boring though, and, unlike Gandalf the White, I think things really are changing. Heck, even my grandmother, crazy Sheryl, walks around with a pack of instant coffee to throw at her Pentecostal friends when they discuss the idea at their Friday night mixers.

“Wake the fuck up,” she tells me she says.  “Do you want people to start comparing you to Elizabeth Hasselbeck? You have your own life to fuck up, let them fuck up there’s too.”

Whether she really says that or not is of little importance to me. The fact that a woman who, until recently, thought gay was a synonym for Satan and HIV an act of benevolence from her special sky friend Jesus, is affirmation enough for me that real-world things can change faster than the sign on the Chinese zodiac, and not only for the worse.

"Things that don't change," I mouth awkwardly, thinking more about my inner dialouge than my outter one. "Well, history has shown that they, they tend to stagnate."

It's awkwardly said, but it's jarringly true.

You can move from the right- to the wrong-side of history pretty quickly. So you can't really go by that. When the collective consciousness decides something, it shifts rapidly. A dozen years after slavery was practiced by a praised president, it became the scarlet letter of the human heart--the sign of how evil we can be when we think selfishly. We laugh and ridicule those that thought the earth was flat, thinking how stupid, how ignorant, how ridiculously naïve, but we're doing it again.

Someday very soon we will be shocked or ashamed that our brains sent messages to our tongues saying "tell the world one man and one woman and our traditions are more important than someone else's--someone lesser's--human rights." We'll believe we would have never stood idly by and allowed for that, that we would have been different; but, I don't want to get into that now.

I just want to keep being happy. That’s always seemed to trouble some people, and maybe it always will; but, it has yet to bother Sherman. The more time I spend with him, the more I like the person I’ve grown into becoming while I walk along-side him in the tundra. I trust myself, and there’s really no one else I’d rather be right now. I think that’s important to have going into a commitment like this—really any commitment to things like walks in the tundra, polar bear second-cousins and the avoidance of arctic char. Like I said, he was a big part of that for me.

I don't know how to say these things to him though. I guess the thing that makes this so worth persuing is that he makes me feel like I don't have to. I can say something stupidly boring and he treats it like art; because, damnit, I am an art teacher.

“Here’s a ring. Do you want to be my partner in crime?” I finally ask him, already knowing the answer. The truth is that he’s always loved me. I’ve always known that. Until recently I never thought he would realize it too, but a funny thing happened this past year. I’ve come to call it life.

“I thought I already was?” he says, confused. “I live my life with you. It’s reflected in your words and it reverberates across your face. I think our hearts beat to the same meter when we sleep.”

I shake my head in agreement. Someday, if I am still with him when I am old and grey--or young and grey, or old and bald for that matter--I imagine he will push me off into the sunset, adrift a tiny iceberg. That seems kind of amazing right now. “Yes, but do you want to share a tax form?”

“Okay,” he smiles, knowingly, as he takes the ring and puts it around one of his furry fingers. “That sounds pretty good to me, especially since you're unemployed now. Why did you get fired, by the way?”

"My supervisor said my snarky humour wasn't appropriate for the workplace."

"That's when you made the comment about Middle Earth isn't it?"

"Yeah," I snicker, recounting the fragments of what already seems like a past life to me now. "Right before I told him Gollum wants his face back. Like I've said before, I'm a classy dude."

"You've never said that to me," Sherman responds. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to matter.

"Oh. I guess it was just implied then." Most things usually are.