Pieces of Me

It has been ages since I talked with someone on the phone for hours on end, laughing so hard I had tears trickling from the corner of my eyes and my voice grew hoarse.

He surprised me tonight by calling me. I had expected an email. Instead he called.

The conversation was deep, yet impersonal, perhaps as protection. Thing is, after all this time, he says things to me that I don't want to hear. He tells me his truths. He tells me how he sees me. Sometimes I am amazed at how closely he sees me. Tonight I discovered that he sees all the different Angies that are here now. He sees how they were created. He sees my truth. And he knows me.

I don't understand how it is that he, of all the people in my world, he is the one who actually sees me. Who gets me, even though he thinks I am a "tree-hugging, hippie-lover nutcase freak" which he says he doesn't understand. On a most fundamental level, he gets me. How is it that he can call out the truth in me that I am only just learning of myself and say it as though it is something he has always known? How is he able to see through the Angie I present to him, because I believe it is the Angie he (or whomever is in front of me at that moment) wants/needs to see, and know that she is only a tiny portion of who I really am? How can he see through my disguises into the core of me? How?!

How is it that, after all these years with so much time and space in between, I can pick up the phone and we can begin into a conversation as though we had just finished talking hours ago? As though I had just hung up and come out of the basement closet, feeling shivery from staying up way too late to talk about everything and nothing with him. As though tomorrow we would do it all again. How is it that the flow is there, so easily? And how does it happen that almost two hours later, when it came time to say good night, it seemed like saying goodnight to one another was well practiced?

At one time it was.

He has amazing insight, although he probably wouldn't use that word. He is a sparring partner unlike any I have ever had. A debate can go on for hours, just for the love of the debate. And it's fun. Opinionated and needing to always be right - both of us - creates interesting battles. And the natural pace that we fall into is easy and lighthearted, punctuated with good, deep-full-belly-throw-your-head-back-with-abandonment-and-laugh-right-out-loud laughter.

They are some of the aspects I miss the most... the always-easeful relating and full-out mirth.

And here I lay, unable to sleep because my mind is so awake and I find myself tripping back to the beginning and wondering... of all the people in my life, why him?