Love out of time, across time, for all time...

I'm watching The Time Traveller's Wife. Again. You'd have loved this film. You'd have loved the book. You'd have loved Kathryn, the work colleague turned band-mate turned friend who first loaned it to me, and her muso man Jimmy. You'd have loved those balmy, insane nights where I'd race down to London for band practice and stay up late in Sevenoaks drinking wine, knowing that I had to have a clear head for client meetings the next morning...

Naturally, the damn film makes me cry, every time. Uncontrolled, uncontrollable hot tears of loss and missing you, of confusion and parallel universes and perfect clarity all at once. First and foremost, because there are a stack of us here who give an arm, an eye, or more, if just one of us could have, just once, the fairy tale ending in this film... the joy of one more visit after you know someone is supposed to be gone.

I've dreamed of it - so many times, and long before I'd ever heard of this particular story. I've dreamed you appearing out of nowhere, on a trip home, in my flat, in a restaurant in the middle of could-be-anyhere. Every time, I figure that I absolutely must be dreaming, because you're supposed to be dead and you're not supposed to be able to come back and you say 'I know, but here I am' in that charming voice you always used when you knew you were challenging something that's supposed to be impossible but you dared to anyway, because to you it was important. And I remember how, on the days where you had hope, nothing was impossible, so I listen to that voice, and I believe...

There's always so much I want to tell you, and sometimes you know it and sometimes you don't. Music - from Oxford to Roma and what a shithole disappointment the Dan has become. The things I've done with work since finishing my masters. Chloe. Ants. And all the other important people stories... the people who've found each other, the births, the deaths, the bustups, the Big Life Events.

Hearing about Ants always makes you sad, but it's not like you and I have been together in a long, long time, and I like to think that you understand. I like to think  that if you really were here to stay, you'd like the man I am married to today. I promise you in any case that he's someone you could respect - not least, because he understands that I can love two husbands, all at once but in two very different ways, and he's man enough to give me the space and trust to do that. He doesn't always like that sometimes you still have the power to make me cry, but it doesn't threaten him or his place in my life, which is rock solid and absolute and has the blessing of something that you and I never had... the sense of a shared future for all time.

So how many different ways do you want me to find affinity with the notion in a movie of a love that spans time, spans worlds, spans from here to the Hereafter, and moves forward and backward in time to pull together a million threads and somehow weaves them into warmth and balm for the soul? To live with multiple simultaneous truths - a life that Was and a life that Is, and those two lives peopled with so many common threads and overlapping moments... and yet somehow, they all weave together to form a cradle for my crazy messed up mind, so that I find myself without regret, without confusion, without anger or bitterness. What is, just is. I'm not sure where the grace to accept that has come from, but I think if you could see it you'd  be bloody proud...