Music Will Be My Constant

My long distance boyfriend and I hit a bit of a rough patch. It can happen when you are dating someone you see often, but when you are dating someone you rarely get to actually date, it can spring out of nowhere and it can be brutal.

As I’ve mentioned before, talking to someone on the phone, you miss a lot of those cues. Texting is even worse and no matter how many times I say, “I don’t want to talk about serious things while texting,” we do just that – we talk about serious things while texting. We argue with our fingers. It’s ridiculous. I hate this distance thing and I do not throw the word “hate” around. Usually I reserve it for Hitler and houseflies, although it would cover terrorists, as well.

I was starting to focus on the problems, the stress, the hurt feelings, and forgetting why I fell in love with him in the first place. I was at the point where I thought, okay maybe we’ve taken this one as far as it can go. I hadn’t given up completely, but I was feeling a step away from there.

Today, I was riding my bike, which is where I do my best thinking, and his song came on my earphones – Swing Life Away, by Rise Against. As I listened to the words I remembered how we bonded over simple ideas like a relationship is a team, a partnership, and shared memories of growing up in the same small town. He would say that coming home to someone who loves you, that makes all the challenges in life – work trouble, finances – easier to handle. He was a man who was actively looking for a committment and I hadn’t met a man like that in more years than I can count.

The fighting, we’ve got to find a way to avoid it. I’m not a person who has any interest in winning an argument. I do not like yelling. It paralyzes me in a way, reminds me of too many scary things. The easiest way to explain how I react is this – I lose my words. If we are fighting, there isn’t going to be any winner, I tell him. We will both lose. It has to stop. This doesn’t mean that I need someone to always agree with me, but I do need someone who can let some things go. Not everything is worth a battle.

When Bay was a little younger, we had a really hard time. She’s scream at me, tell me how much she hated me, using language that I can’t repeat here. It sucked. I felt like I was looking at a stranger. One day I found a box of old pictures and I got an idea. I took a picture of her at an especially sweet time and I taped it to the refrigerator door. When she would act ugly, I’d look at that photo and remember that my beautiful baby still lived inside that crazy teenager.

My boyfriend, he’s no crazy teenager, but sometimes he’s just as frustrating (I’m sure he would say the same about me – I’m no angel, but I do try….). I’m going to use his song the same way I did my Bailey-picture. It will be my constant, the place I can come back to, to regroup and remember that we won’t always live so far from each other…..Someday we will be fighting in the same room…..okay, that was a joke.

Image credit: Chase Your Bliss Photography