I’ve been working through some issues with a coworker. He doesn’t know me and has been reading my emails such that he believes I think don’t respect him, or “think he is stupid.” It has been a frustrating experience, but I’ve been learning from it; particular how to deal with people who tend to get angry easily.

On the commute home the other night it got me thinking about experiences with people I’ve dated where they got angry and directed it at me for small things.

In Chapter 10 of We are Become Pals, by the A Softer World folks, one of the main characters says something rude to someone and “The hurt on her face was so sudden and so unexpected.” I seem to always remember Z getting upset with me when we ran a ride light on bicycles together once because I didn’t leave enough room for her to avoid riding over a man-hole cover. In other circumstances, it could have been slick. If we had stopped to check for traffic, it would have been a slower situation. Under the circumstances, it was fine, but her anger hurt. I really loved her and that hurt. This wasn’t an isolated incident. Mostly, I opened up, then was severed, and what had been cautiously advanced began flailing widely.

I had similar experiences with M; such a period of feeling hurt in retrospect.

My cousin Sierra had lunch with me today as she passed through Seattle. We spent some time discussing the fallacy that life is simple and that everyone is just making the wrong choices because they’re stupid. I give much room for everyone being different and having lived their own individual lives. Still, I don’t pretend to understand it, and I’ll only postulate so far as to their reasoning. Even then, for only so far. I feel incredibly fortunate to have finally fallen in love with someone who is openly and willingly emotionally introspective and available. To some degree it is finally being in the same place as well. Some activities, like tracking down people who have checked out from the reality that I live in, remind me how lucky I am to have that.

When M called me her “ex-partner,” I had some internal doubts. Her lack of commitment, in fact her phobia of commitment, was the demise of our relationship. A conversation with Kate about the definition of partnership determined that building something together was key, and you can’t build anything if you can’t follow through. Perhaps some people disagree. I could see some “activist types” disagreeing whose goal is a utopia rather than simple solid progress.

I’m moving to Maine.

I haven’t known how to say this exactly, but as dates draw closer it is remarkable simpler. This weekend I head to Burning Man. I return around 9/6 and on 9/10 I have a one-way airplane ticket to Maine. Of course, I had a one-way ticket in March before my father died, but that was more of an open-ended deal and less of a move. I expect I will return to Seattle at Christmas to spend time with my Mother. If all goes well, Kate and I will both fly out for a bit, and then drive the Suburban and a U-Haul trailer back to Maine. So that may be when I’m really moving. That I have most everything I need in both places right now has made it confusing. Perhaps the biggest shift is that I’m planning on almost entirely moving out of my bedroom this week.

Why? First, nothing was made more clear by my fathers death than the mortality of my family. My grandparents are all nearing eighty, making moving back to Maine “someday” a non-starter. It has to be now. Second, it is the life I’ve wanted. Every time I’ve come back to Seattle from visiting home, I haven’t felt right. This has usually been dismissed by others as being the product of a vacation but that hasn’t added up. I miss the woods; not the woods where we all go hiking on the weekends and camp in the tents we bought at REI, but the woods that I wake up in every day and have the smell of fresh cut firewood. Third, an incredibly lucky bonus on my part, Kate. Some time ago I bet Tanya $20 that I would marry Kate, and I intend to collect on that bet. As a man who doesn’t ever bet more than a shiny nickel, my seriousness should be evident.

Kate is a huge part of my life, present and future. The romantic story of our past is cute as well, but elementary school was a long time ago. I’ve gotten past needing a label for my relationship with Kate, because all of them require caveats and additional explanation. This is appropriate, because you can’t tell one life from the other any longer.