Choosing Each Other

This morning started a little differently than I expected.

I was lying in bed, typing out a text to Dawna. Just a simple message telling her how much I loved her. I was finishing the last sentence when my phone buzzed.

That was odd.

She isn't normally a morning person. If my phone is going off this early and it's her, something is probably wrong.

The text simply read, "Have a big problem."

Well...

Shit.

I finished the sentence I was writing and hit send because love should always come first.

Except when it doesn't.

A second later she sent a picture. Her yard had become a pond. Right in the middle was a growing bubble where water under pressure was forcing its way to the surface. You didn't need to be a plumber to know this wasn't going to be cheap.

She's staying at the house for a friend who bought it, so it isn't even the normal equation. If it were a rental, you'd call the landlord. If it were your own house, you'd shut off the water, grab a shovel, and start figuring out where the leak was.

But none of that really changes the first priority: Get the goddamned water turned off.

Whether the leak is on the utility side or the property side can wait. Whether insurance gets involved can wait. Whether somebody eventually pays the bill can wait. First, you stop the water.

She got a plumber headed that way and started working through the problem. And there I sat in Santa Fe, three hundred miles away, completely fucking useless.

That's one of the hardest parts about loving someone. When they're hurting, when they're stressed, when life throws a wrench into their day, every instinct inside you wants to shoulder some of that burden. You want to make the phone calls. You want to dig the hole. You want to hold the flashlight. You want to solve the problem. Instead, sometimes all you can do is answer the phone.

I hated that.

Not because I doubted she'd figure it out. She absolutely will. I hated it because I wanted to be standing beside her while she did.

Thankfully, that problem has an expiration date.

After breakfast this morning, I'm heading north. This weekend marks the beginning of something we've both been looking forward to for a long time. For the first time, we get an entire weekend together without work pulling her away. No rushing off to a shift. No squeezing moments together between obligations. Just us.

We'll drive together. We'll eat together. We'll laugh together. We'll sleep beside one another. We'll wake up together. We'll simply exist in the same space.

That might not sound like much. But to me, it's everything.

Then comes the part I'm probably even more excited about.

This weekend we pick up her first motorcycle.

I've been saying for weeks that she's already a rider. She just doesn't own a motorcycle yet. This weekend, that changes.

She gets to begin writing her own story on two wheels.

Not mine. Hers.

There's another reason this weekend means so much to me, though.

She says something to me fairly often that absolutely melts my heart. She'll look at me and simply say, "I choose you."

Those three words mean more to me than I know how to express.

Life forces so many things upon us. We don't choose where we're born. We don't choose the families we inherit. We don't choose tragedy. We don't choose trauma. We don't choose the moments that forever change us.

But we do choose who walks beside us.

Every single day, she chooses me.

She chooses to call me when life gets hard. She chooses to trust me with her fears. She chooses to reach for my hand. She chooses to let me into her world. She chooses to have me standing beside her as she experiences this incredible, messy, beautiful life.

That fucking matters.

And this weekend, she's choosing to share another first with me.

She's choosing me to stand beside her as she buys her first motorcycle. She's choosing me to bear witness as she discovers what every rider eventually discovers: that the wind has a funny way of quieting the soul. That freedom isn't something you read about. It's something you feel.

I already know she's going to love it.

I already know she's going to get it.

The water leak this morning reminded me of something.

Life is never going to stop throwing problems at us. There will always be broken pipes. Broken motorcycles. Broken plans. Broken hearts. That's simply the price of living.

The question isn't whether those moments are coming. The question is who you want standing beside you when they do.

Today I'm still a few hundred miles away.

But not for long.

In a few hours, I'll be headed north toward the woman who chooses me. Toward the woman I choose.

Tomorrow she'll throw her leg over her very first motorcycle.

And I have a feeling that years from now, we won't remember the broken water line. We'll remember that this was the weekend everything changed. The weekend she stopped being someone who loved motorcycles...

...and became a rider.