Love Thursday

{Santa Fe, 2008}

A slow and quiet morning at the Day Job has allowed me something incredibly unusual and valuable these days: me-time. Glorious, cherished, lovely me-time ... *sigh* ... it has been awhile. And so I decided to kick back with some Etsy browsing, Weddingbee-ing and blog reading (Dan sent me this great link, which then led me to this blog, which led me to this blog and then this one and...ahhh! so many lovely blogs out there!)

This one in particular grabbed my attention and I loved her "love thursday: out of focus" post so much that I decided to do one of my own (click here for more on "Love Thursday").

I have much to be thankful for these days when it comes to love, and although I have mentioned before that I am not much of a "public gusher," a wee bit of gushing is necessary at this moment :)

[Note: part of the reason I am a bit 'gush gun-shy' on this blog is because I am ultra-sensitive to the fact that there are many people out there in all sorts of different places when it comes to love and relationships, and hearing somebody else gush can bring out a range of conflicting emotions. I speak from experience. Just know, dear readers, that I write this from a place of extreme tender-heartedness, with an understanding and sensitivity that comes from a long history of failed love attempts, heartbreak and loneliness. I hope that, more than anything, my words somehow bring hope. Okay, end note and continuing on....]

Last night, Dan (being the incredible man that he is) agreed to meet me down in the Theater District at 10:00 after my rehearsal and have dinner with me (this is life lately: dinner at 10 or 11 p.m., bed at 1 or 2 a.m. Bad. Very bad). We ended up at a cute, rustic looking Italian place along 9th avenue and shared some red wine and yummy food as I jabbered on and on about rehearsal. For some reason, the convo turned and one of us got started on how happy the other one made us, or how we envision our future together, or how we never imagined that we would ever feel this way or find this kind of love...something along those lines! And then suddenly words and tears and emotions were just spilling out all over our plates of pasta! (Okay, so this is maybe not THAT unusual of a scenario -- we are actually both closet gushers :) but for some reason it just hit us both pretty hard last night...this really HUGE love of ours. And how incredibly lucky we are. And how far we've come in our lives to find one another. We both know what it's like to be broken by another person, to be alone, to have little hope that there really is someone out there....there were dark times for us both. But now here we are we (and I know I've never shared our story on here. I will do that at some point, I promise) and it feels all the sweeter and more amazing because of the roads we've traveled to get to this point.

I keep telling him that I feel like I won the prize! Like I got THE BEST MAN in the world! I guess that's what love does, though, right? Changes perspective, makes everything brighter, richer. Or as the writer of the 'Love Thursday' post stated: "My eyes have never seemed to regain their focus."

I enjoyed reading the comments left on her page, hearing the stories of others...so if you feel so inspired, go over there and leave your own Love Thursday comment on her blog. Or feel free to post one here -- I welcome it! (now that you know I'm a sucker for love :)