the Village Knittiot

Today Mr. Knittiot and I celebrate our one year anniversary. Like all good stories, ours started long ago in another time and place. And like all good heroes and heroines, we didn’t get here without our fair share of struggle, disappointment, fear and sorrow. But, if we learned nothing from fairy tales at least we learned it is the beauty and the promise of love that carries you.

I was sixteen the first summer I worked at the Renaissance Festival, and I felt every second the possibility of life and the anticipation of serendipitous change in the way I imagine many sixteen year olds do. One evening, just before the closing canon, I was standing there on the fringes of the nightly drum jam watching the belly dancers twirl themselves into oblivion, the gypsies beating out a hypnotic rhythm. There was that particular smell that I always associate with festival, a blend of patchouli and smoke and sweat mixed with hay and the scents of summer evenings in the country. I had a rose in my hand that one of the flower girls had sold to me for a dollar. Then the most amazing thing happened, I looked across the field to my left. How many things in our lives have changed forever because we looked to the left or took a right turn and ended up somewhere else?

I’m painfully aware that I can never really describe this moment without breaking down into the language of romance novels and old movies. But truly, when I looked to my left, the light at that particular moment wrapped itself around this one man like a halo. Everything in him glowed, the long hair hanging around his shoulders, the skin of his face, his hands. I’m pretty certain it was in that instant that I loved him. And even though I’m not sure I believe in past lives, if I ever recognized someone I’ve never met, it was him. I walked up to him and handed him the rose, which he promptly ate. Yes, this was the love of my life.

His was the most amazing friendship I’ve ever had. It influenced me in ways I am still discovering. But timing is a curious thing, and in the end we lost touch the way people do. But there were dreams. Almost every third month like clockwork. The kind so real you have to think about where you are when you wake up. For years I secretly believed he was stopping by in my dreams to check on me, make sure I was okay. And I was sure that if I ever needed him, he would know and be there. Apparently I was right.

A couple years after college, I was working in a miserable soul-sucking job when I suddenly sat bolt upright in the middle of my day and said (almost out loud) “I have to find him.” And I did. Of course, that is a whole other rabbit trail of a story that ends right here where I am sitting at my computer typing out a story that is still a little unbelievable to me.

The morning we were getting ready to go down to the court house I happened to be straightening up a few things in my office and came across a very old journal dated from 1997 – four years after the last time I had seen Corvus. I opened it up to somewhere in the middle and right at the bottom of the page I saw that I had written “Today I told God that Corvus is the only person I want to marry.”

Sometimes, dreams do come true…

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 28th, 2005 at 7:10 am and is filed under this Random Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.