Seven

"It isn't until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems - the ones that make you truly who you are - that you're ready to find a life-long mate. Only then do you know what you're looking for. You're looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person - someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, 'This is the problem I want to have."

Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions

"True love is not the kind of thing you should turn down.

Don't ever turn it down."

The Avett Brothers, "January Wedding"

I have to be careful in the fall. Transformative stuff can happen in my life when the leaves begin to turn red because sometimes the universe has things in mind for me. Maybe it's because I was born in the fall, or because I'm so sensitive to the decline of the light, or because it's a natural time of transition. I don't know, but I have spent a lot of autumns in extreme emotional turmoil, extreme passion, or both. The three most significant romantic relationships that I have had in my life all began in the fall.

Seven years ago this October, I was stuck in a crappy job and an increasingly unhappy marriage. I hadn't had a full night's sleep in at least eighteen months. It was warm that year, like this October, and the trees were amazingly vivid during one sunny day after another. To me it felt like the sky had opened up and like the ocean of my unconscious was roaring to the surface. I'd blame it on the sleep deprivation, if it weren't for the fact that it happened to him, too.

Sometimes when you think everything is lost, you get a little help to see things differently. Sometimes you realize that the person that has been the best friend you've ever had isn't so far out of reach, and it's pretty likely that you were meant to save each other. Sometimes you're standing on a street corner with him and he says, "I want you to come with me," and you realize that you don't know where you're going, but there's no way in hell you're turning down that invitation.

Seven years later, I'm even surer that we made the right decision.