In Which a Visit Is Arranged and Lucas Makes a Jailbreak

Gentle reader, the goddess continues to smile upon her humble servant.

It is a lovely, balmy evening in Appalachia, and I have just gotten off the phone with none other than the beloved Lucas himself. He messaged me on the interwebs yesterday, and I of course asked if I could speak to him as soon as possible. I called, and I finally got to tell him everything I have been wishing with mounting urgency to say for years, about how much my memory of him has come to mean to me. He had to run off to an AA meeting fairly soon after, but I called again today and we spoke at greater length about what has been going on in our lives for the last few years.

He had just finished a six-month jail sentence and started to clean up his life, apparently by the inspiration of a three year old daughter. A daughter! If she's anything like her father, she has to be absolutely enchanting. I was much heartened by his story of the benefits of lockup for his sense of purpose and self-worth. He's still as clever and sweet and incorrigibly sexual as I remembered. I wish he wasn't on parole and stuck in the midwest for the next year. Regardless, whenever he's free and can get himself over to my mountains, oh reader, I predict that I shall have some beautiful smut to write.

Speaking of beauty, Caleb and I have a plan for me to visit him in less than two weeks. I am positively atwitter about it. It seems that my amorous adventures may end up putting a lot of mileage on my poor old car in the future. If this connection with Caleb keeps progressing, and the next few years of his life go according to his current plan, I may always have to drive at least a couple of hours in order to see him in any context that allows lovers to be lovers--i.e. circumstances other than clandestine outdoor hookups. So it goes.

Perhaps longish-distance relationships have their perks, though. You get to write letters, you don't have to worry that you'll get sick of each other or that the relationship will succumb to ennui, and you have fewer of the logistical problems that come along with being publicly connected to multiple partners in a small town where people gossip. Besides, I'm not sure I could handle that kind of lusciousness more than a few times a month.

Likewise, I often feel like Simon is the only person with whom I have the type of connection that keeps me excited to be with him as often as I do. We've spent much time and energy building a rapport that keeps us in a mode of personal growth and new discovery with each other; there is no one else with whom I have so much to talk about on any given day.

The conclusion I'm coming to about what I want in other relationships is that intermittence is just about as important as regularity or certainty. I would consider my love life very successful if I were surrounded by several lovers with whom I have meaningful, trusting connections--ones in which everyone is committed to staying "together" in whatever loose sense we can mean by that word--and whom I see regularly but perhaps somewhat infrequently. And of course, I would like for my little constellation to be built on solid principles of friendship, too; I'd like for all of us to truly be there for each other in times of need, and all the other things that make for positive relationships of any kind.

Of course, if Lucas and I were to become lovers (again) some time in the future, for example, then I would have to settle for something not just somewhat infrequent. Contact would be very rare in that case, but with someone I've loved that much and for this long, meetings would be extremely special. I could handle that.

These have been golden days. Signing off now.