When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

W.H.Auden



My lover...


My lover is talented and smart. He keeps surprising me with all he can do, and all he can do he does well. He's the most intelligent person i know but he's never arrogant about it. He's never boring, never dull, keeps me wanting more of him everytime.

I ask him how can he be so modest when he's so wonderful and he says: "I'm wonderful but only in your eyes,sweetie"

He says i've changed him...made him better but that's not true. Before me, before our love he was already who he is now. I'm blessed cause he let me in, he showed me his world with no fear, no masks. And with him i grew, i learned...about him, about myself, about life.

I ask him how can he still be here and he says: T"There's no other place i rather be,angel"

He calls me angel and i smile. I'm no angel...never been but when he says it i believe it.

Our love is not easy, is not simple. Is a constant battle against a desperate fate and we waiver sometimes...i more than him. I get tired, i get mad, i cry but he always gives me strength, he listens and he dries my tears away.

I ask him to call my name and he says: "Isabel"

He says it differently, in his voice my name sounds like a note in a beautiful song and i never liked my name...until he said it.

We have fun together, we put every other couple to shame. He's the sexiest man alive and i have my moments. I close my eyes, i feel his touch i see my skin against his skin. kissing, licks, sweat, heat. I get on top, he closes his eyes and i have to catch my breath cause it's too much, too good.  All mine he is and all of me belongs to him

I ask him if he will always love me...even when i'm gone and he says: "I'll find you and I'll keep loving you, our love is too big for a life this short"

Never had a love like this, never wanted someone this much. I know it was him all along, the ones before were a test, a trial. All i wanted was to get here and i have tears of joy running down my face knowing i got what i wanted in the end for i got this chance to meet him...to love him...to have him love me.

I won't go until i know for certain I'll find him again. I won't go if all we have is this time. I won't go if i have to be without him.

My lover...


My lover is talented and smart. He keeps surprising me with all he can do, and all he can do he does well. He's the most intelligent person i know but he's never arrogant about it. He's never boring, never dull, keeps me wanting more of him everytime.

I ask him how can he be so modest when he's so wonderful and he says: "I'm wonderful but only in your eyes,sweetie"

He says i've changed him...made him better but that's not true. Before me, before our love he was already who he is now. I'm blessed cause he let me in, he showed me his world with no fear, no masks. And with him i grew, i learned...about him, about myself, about life.

I ask him how can he still be here and he says: T"There's no other place i rather be,angel"

He calls me angel and i smile. I'm no angel...never been but when he says it i believe it.

Our love is not easy, is not simple. Is a constant battle against a desperate fate and we waiver sometimes...i more than him. I get tired, i get mad, i cry but he always gives me strength, he listens and he dries my tears away.

I ask him to call my name and he says: "Isabel"

He says it differently, in his voice my name sounds like a note in a beautiful song and i never liked my name...until he said it.

We have fun together, we put every other couple to shame. He's the sexiest man alive and i have my moments. I close my eyes, i feel his touch i see my skin against his skin. kissing, licks, sweat, heat. I get on top, he closes his eyes and i have to catch my breath cause it's too much, too good.  All mine he is and all of me belongs to him

I ask him if he will always love me...even when i'm gone and he says: "I'll find you and I'll keep loving you, our love is too big for a life this short"

Never had a love like this, never wanted someone this much. I know it was him all along, the ones before were a test, a trial. All i wanted was to get here and i have tears of joy running down my face knowing i got what i wanted in the end for i got this chance to meet him...to love him...to have him love me.

I won't go until i know for certain I'll find him again. I won't go if all we have is this time. I won't go if i have to be without him.



Beautiful.  I wish I could put it that eloquently. And I also wish I was the lucky guy - but I know I could never live up to your expectations (apart from that fact that we're oceans apart and I'm just an old fart).


As for love...that one, special, all consuming feeling...The real thing...I'm still waiting. To put in the words of the Pet Shop Boys: "Just when you least expect it / Just what you least expect" (Love Comes Quickly)

Apologies. My memories are ten times longer and more rambling than I had intended them to be.

September 7, 1999. The day started better than normal, it was the first day of a new term, but the previous day had been surprisingly warm. I was more-or-less happy enough to get back to school, after all, six weeks away, I kinda had itchy feet. The previous term had finished well, received word that I once again got top marks in maths class, albeit with 12 percent lower of a mark than I had received in the first year's exam. I hadn't been feeling well that day, and I was happy to be healthy for at least one set of exams.

The morning was a happy one. Back then I was running a moderately sensible sleeping pattern. Science first thing. I never did understand science. If ever we cross paths, please don't ask me to wire a plug, or to circle the Islets of Langerhans. Her story runs that we had crossed paths in the corridor once prior to lunch that day. I swear it to be untrue, but we can always agree to disagree. Something left me somewhat less hungry at lunchtime than normal. I guess back then I had such little of an appetite that I could finish whatever dinner I had made myself in four minutes flat.

It was love at first sight, for sure. For me anyway. That three quarters of an hour we spent together on the first afternoon was pretty surreal. Sometimes you don't understand your actions until quite a long time afterwards. I was somewhat amazed, therefore, she loved me back. For so, so long we just laughed. Heck, it took two weeks until we even plucked up the courage to kiss. I went insane. Why had I been missing out on this for so long?!

One thing led to another and we just sat and absorbed every last piece of information. She had what sounded at first to be a normal family. She was all too keen to tell me. Father and mother living at home, apparently in a very happy relationship with each other.

Oh how I laughed on that first occasion actually sat inside her home. In retrospect it was incredibly wrong to do so. Her "mother", if I can even call her that, was drunk off her face, her father obviously had just gone along with everything she had said for the twelve years up to that point that they had been together. And the smell. Oh Lord. Booze, cigarettes, and drugs worse than I had ever encountered before. The walls were practically peeling off, eight windows were smashed in the back garden, and the tricycle that Mel had outgrown probably eight years ago or more was still lying there, upside-down, in the middle of the garden. And here was this young woman growing up in a house where she could barely work out whether or not she belonged.

She sat in my lap that afternoon, like a young child does her mother, and I see the destruction of the last line of defence. So long had gone by where I had felt like screaming, and a young girl was coming home to her own environment and she started crying. I was blown away. She had built up all this energy over the years, and here was I, new in her life, and it was to me that she felt the need to cry. A small part of me felt flattered, but a rather larger part was completely, entirely disgusted. How could anyone let it go this far?

We learnt more and more about each other, but it wasn’t until much, much later that I find Mel had been adopted. I think that’s the right word. Her real mother, I would find out nearly eight years later, went completely crazy and left Mel lying in a basket on the doorstep of two random strangers. I ask myself, couldn’t she have chosen better strangers?

Therefore, school was an escape. School was the place to run around, school was the place to scream and shout and act as we pleased. Within reason, of course. One of the teachers at school was tremendously offended that we had found each other. Maybe he was just frustrated with himself that he was old, decrepit, and unable to feel the same thing for any other human he had ever met. The minute me and Mel found our first private moment away from almost anyone else, he found us and his first words to the two of us, as educator, and role model, “What the f*ck do you think you’re doing?!”

I maintain my dignity. Almost. Baby runs off crying. “Listen,” I replied calmly to the teacher, “You’ve known me for 732 days now. You know this has never, never happened to me. You realize that if we hadn’t have found each other, today, now, in this place, I would be just as confused, just as irritable as I was yesterday.”

Teacher was quicker, more eloquent, with his words. “Monday? I wasn’t here Monday. Were you?!” That glare - part sarcasm, part interrogation, and yet part sensitivity - I swear a teacher learns to glare like that at training school. I nearly cried, and suddenly, without a word of explanation, he softened. “Just - just keep out of trouble.” He winked and let me run, at which point I closed the sliding door and we met up once again.

The sympathetic head tilt. Baby was clearly worried about what was going on. “It’s… it’s fine”, I said. We briefly walked away, but only for long enough for the both of us to go to the bathroom. Back in each other’s arms, for the time being, I reassured Mel that everything was going to be fine. For today. Other than a brief chat at the end of the day to find out what had been learned between the two of us. Somehow that first day was more treacherous than any other.

It was the following day I was to meet Liam. Charming lad, an inch or so shorter than me, but I had 874 days headstart on him so he could be excused. A soccer fan, too. Chelsea. I was disappointed in him, but we got chatting. He had minor troubles reading as a child, so we had a certain level of sympathy for each other. Quirky sense of humour, too, and unlike Mel, no sign of personal troubles, at home or indeed in his previous education. The kind of guy who you could just get to know from acting like a goofball for more than five consecutive minutes.

Me and Mel were keen to hook up again that Wednesday morning. I repeated my teacher’s words, and Mel saw the funny side. “Eee lass”, I would bellow in a dodgy Yorkshire accent, “Just - just stay out of trouble”. Remembering the words that the teacher had, himself, said to me just the afternoon previous, Mel giggled.

Liam, on the other hand, couldn’t be persuaded. It was that same afternoon I saw the two of them kissing. I merely assumed it was the kind of thing that happened in relationships - “Hey!” I said, jokingly, “I thought we had gone through this!” A friend who was with me at the time saw the two of them with me and looked puzzled. “Matt”, Sarah said strongly, “Do something.”

Of course, I did something. I danced my troubles away. Is there really anything more appropriate to do in any situation than to dance away your troubles? Sarah looked on in despair and that afternoon, surrounded by my own friends, I rather shamefully fell asleep. I assure you this was probably the first time they saw me less excited than them about an afternoon. I had to let myself out of the class and use the cloakrooms.

In retrospect I can't believe I let the same thing happen five times. Maybe if two people are truly destined to be together, they allow this stuff to happen between them. Sure, socially I felt closer to girls than I did to guys, just as Mel felt socially closer to guys without you being able to label her a tomboy. But sometimes, just sometimes, I feel there may well be a line that you just don't go crossing.

Although when it happened, I was clueless. Every single damn time, the day after, I would laugh it off. I really did not know how to react. I found it impossible, though, to deny the love. How could I possibly break off being friends with whom I had shared almost all my secrets?

While school was a hard time, real life ever since has been much, much easier. Mel's "mother" died around three years after I finished school, and to this day I cannot understand whether her death was related to her insane levels of smoking or just to a mad moment where she decided she could no longer cope, after which she committed suicide. She was only 35, but had surely lived a life depressing enough that she felt for some reason she could no longer emotionally deal with the stuff she felt was on her plate.

The one true shock, however, was Mel's father. Very much the "quiet one" of the relationship between the two, even though the two were going through a divorce at the time of Mel's mother's death, he was seemingly contractually obliged to go along with every last little thing that his wife had said. It shocked me therefore, the minute he got his independence from her, that he was also unable to cope, despite the two being at loggerheads for most of the last two years of Mel's mother's life.

I received a phonecall just two weeks after Mel's mother's death. Her dad had been discovered unconscious, bleeding on the floor, from what appeared, upon closer inspection, to be self-inflicted knife wounds. While I, with the limit of my medical knowledge, attempted to figure out what the heck I had to do, he passed away a few minutes after I arrived at his house. Just two weeks after having lost one of the most important influences of her life, Mel had to go through with losing the second. How you can lose two parents, and despite not feeling emotionally close to them during your life, have it happen so quickly, and yet to pull through, is something I will never understand. The strength of spirit, and the willingness for Mel to say, directly to me, "Babe, we can get through this."

We?, I thought, You're the one who is supposed to be suffering emotionally through this. For the second time, strength of spirit, strength of character, and personal belief got her to that moment, having nowhere to go and no personal experience to guide her on the way.

It wasn't until her father's funeral, which both myself, Mel, and pretty much all of her mother's side of the family, avoided, that Mel's aunt told me a secret. "Promise", she said, very gently, "That you won't tell anyone?"

Mel's aunt sat me down and, as I have previously referenced, almost destroyed me. "You know, don't you? About her mum and dad?" I shook my head. "They.. aren't really her mum and dad", she said, cutting straight to the point.

"What the.." --

Her aunt sat me down and told me the story of Mel's adoption, and I was scared. I had no idea what any of it meant. I never realized the secret would have destroyed the family, but it wasn't worth it while either of her "parents" could do anything about it.

From that moment on, I had nothing but an awesome amount of respect for every little bit of physical and mental abuse that Mel had gone through, and, I ensured her aunt, I would make sure that she would never, ever have to feel quite so down in the same way ever again. A few years down the line, this is the kind of thing that I knew Mel would never be able to go through alone. And to merely be the one able to take care of every part of her emotion, is an insane, but ultimately fulfilling experience.

That's one of many reasons why I love her. There are so, so many more, but discovering the truth about her family at the same time as she did, was one of the most privileged, and yet scariest, moments of my life. Here we are, nine and a half years after we first met, and the fire still burns.

My husband is a genius.  He's passionate and compassionate.  and he saved me from myself.  Often I get lost within myself, I so often worry so much about pleasing everyone around me that I forget to worry about myself.  He pulls me out of that mindset and shows me that someone cares about me, just for myself, I don't have to be anything, just myself.  It's still something I don't fully understand, why would anyone want to be with me?  ;D On our first date, we spent 8 hours together, driving around, sharing with me stories of his childhood, places in the city that I was visiting, places that had meaning for him.  When my parents were fighting and using me as a go-between, my husband showed me that I needed to remove myself from that situation or go insane from the stress of pleasing them.  When my small town was dying and I was living a mediocre life there, he chose to give me the confidence that I could survive if I moved away. 

My husband and I are a team, we even each other out.  In some ways, we are total opposites, but in the important ways we think like one another.  My husband is so smart, but not arrogant, he will explain things in common language that makes impossible concepts readily understandable to everyone.
He oftens tells me he loves me.  He tells his friends he loves me (where in past relationships I've been in, that was not the case, moreso, they were so embarrassed that they settled for me that I was kept secret, and a picture that was 20 years old (when I was younger and thinner,) was kept on display.  He shares his hobbies with me, he trusts my judgement and always seeks my advice.
He may not be perfect for everybody, but he is perfect for me, and for that I am truly grateful. 

beautiful words everyone. You are all very blessed.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

W.H.Auden



My lover...


My lover is talented and smart. He keeps surprising me with all he can do, and all he can do he does well. He's the most intelligent person i know but he's never arrogant about it. He's never boring, never dull, keeps me wanting more of him everytime.

I ask him how can he be so modest when he's so wonderful and he says: "I'm wonderful but only in your eyes,sweetie"

He says i've changed him...made him better but that's not true. Before me, before our love he was already who he is now. I'm blessed cause he let me in, he showed me his world with no fear, no masks. And with him i grew, i learned...about him, about myself, about life.

I ask him how can he still be here and he says: T"There's no other place i rather be,angel"

He calls me angel and i smile. I'm no angel...never been but when he says it i believe it.

Our love is not easy, is not simple. Is a constant battle against a desperate fate and we waiver sometimes...i more than him. I get tired, i get mad, i cry but he always gives me strength, he listens and he dries my tears away.

I ask him to call my name and he says: "Isabel"

He says it differently, in his voice my name sounds like a note in a beautiful song and i never liked my name...until he said it.

We have fun together, we put every other couple to shame. He's the sexiest man alive and i have my moments. I close my eyes, i feel his touch i see my skin against his skin. kissing, licks, sweat, heat. I get on top, he closes his eyes and i have to catch my breath cause it's too much, too good.  All mine he is and all of me belongs to him

I ask him if he will always love me...even when i'm gone and he says: "I'll find you and I'll keep loving you, our love is too big for a life this short"

Never had a love like this, never wanted someone this much. I know it was him all along, the ones before were a test, a trial. All i wanted was to get here and i have tears of joy running down my face knowing i got what i wanted in the end for i got this chance to meet him...to love him...to have him love me.

I won't go until i know for certain I'll find him again. I won't go if all we have is this time. I won't go if i have to be without him.




that's beautiful Isabel. I thought I was reading a romance novel. you're a good writer. you might wanna pursue that.  I'll tell ya one other thing. there was one part where my glasses got steamed over and if I was Paris Hilton, I'd have said "that's hot"  8)

well done

My husband is a genius.  He's passionate and compassionate.  and he saved me from myself.  Often I get lost within myself, I so often worry so much about pleasing everyone around me that I forget to worry about myself.  He pulls me out of that mindset and shows me that someone cares about me, just for myself, I don't have to be anything, just myself.  It's still something I don't fully understand, why would anyone want to be with me?   ;D On our first date, we spent 8 hours together, driving around, sharing with me stories of his childhood, places in the city that I was visiting, places that had meaning for him.  When my parents were fighting and using me as a go-between, my husband showed me that I needed to remove myself from that situation or go insane from the stress of pleasing them.  When my small town was dying and I was living a mediocre life there, he chose to give me the confidence that I could survive if I moved away. 

My husband and I are a team, we even each other out.  In some ways, we are total opposites, but in the important ways we think like one another.  My husband is so smart, but not arrogant, he will explain things in common language that makes impossible concepts readily understandable to everyone.
He oftens tells me he loves me.  He tells his friends he loves me (where in past relationships I've been in, that was not the case, moreso, they were so embarrassed that they settled for me that I was kept secret, and a picture that was 20 years old (when I was younger and thinner,) was kept on display.  He shares his hobbies with me, he trusts my judgement and always seeks my advice.
He may not be perfect for everybody, but he is perfect for me, and for that I am truly grateful. 
that is so touching Patty. It's nice to be loved fo who you are.  thanks for sharing