standing confidently by a goat.

“So, what do you think I should do?” asks my friend, after telling me about this girl who has been on again and off again in his life for a while now.

“You know you don’t want to marry her?” I clarify.

“Not how she is right now…”

“Which is, how, exactly?” I ask.

“Desperate…wanting to be rescued by a man–by a husband–afraid to stand on her own two feet. She just keeps telling me over and over again how she really wants to be loved.”

“Loved?” I repeat.

“Yeah, loved,” he repeats, too.

“And this girl–does she have parents? Siblings? Extended family? Friends?” I say.

“Of course she does–”

“And all those people I listed–all those people in her life, crowding her heart–they let her know how they feel about her?”

“Without a doubt,” he says, not skipping a beat.

“When are we all gonna realize,” I say quietly, half to myself now as well as to him, “That being single does not mean you aren’t loved.”

We–this guy I had met only hours before–sit there quietly, then. We stare out the windows of the moving cab, watching how the rain makes the Brooklyn street lights hazy and soft, the way a movie tells the audience they’re watching a dream scene. The way my heart feels when I remember how it is: that I am loved. That this glorious fact outweighs every other thing that sits on the scale of What Really Matters.

“I think,” I finally say, slowly, “I think that you’re telling me clearly that you know. What to do, I mean. I think you just need to listen to what you’re already saying.”

And it’s true, isn’t it? We sometimes ask others what we ourselves already know. I think it’s because we want to be confirmed–or maybe even argued with–but, we are asking questions that are really rhetorical in nature. Maybe we want a connection with others over our life circumstances. I know that, for me, I just sometimes need to talk out my feelings, much the way that I need to write them out, too. It’s like playing a cerebral game of connect-the-dots; every word and thought and idea leads you to another clue until finally, you step back, and there’s a picture, clear as day.

And you wonder how it is you didn’t see it until now.

Oh, well. Truth has a funny way of revealing itself. If that’s what we really want, anyway.

I am feeling nostalgic tonight. I just got to my parents’ house. My mom and I were sorting through old papers of mine; papers from what seems like a different lifetime. I found old cards. They had ghosts all over them, these cards. Old, dead relationships leapt out at me from the honeyed and rhyming words that someone had bought at a Hallmark with me in mind.

One, especially, made me…well, laugh. Great big, gulping sounds of laughter filled the room as I read the tiny, hand-written note attached to a card that said something about how he wants to be with me forever.

Forever.

Forever meant something very different to him than it did to me, as it turns out.

But the note. It was short and to the point, which was basically a catch-all apology. Talk about covering your bases.

Dear Jess, I’m really sorry for the times I have made you feel not special or unloved. I do love you. Happy Valentine’s Day. 

That I do love you. Oh, gosh. Written like an argument, with fists swinging. Who was saying he didn’t? I wonder. Why was it written like that? And why did I read that note and think it was a good idea to stay with him?

Certainly this little girl, standing confidently next to a goat, knew she deserved the moon.

When did she forget?

When the goat left?

She certainly stopped standing next to goats. That’s probably the first problem; we all need a hearty goat to stand next to, I think–something to remind us of our worth and give us a little gumption.

That way, when we read a card like that, we’ll know.

Stop standing next to him, and for the love of all that’s good–go find that goat!

And wait for a man who doesn’t give you notes that say unloved and not special, and talk about his love for you like it’s the last thing anyone would believe of him.

Here’s to knowing we’re loved.

And growing all hazy and soft inside with that knowledge. Like the misty lights on the Brooklyn Bridge that I admired a few nights ago with a guy I barely knew.