I drive too fast.
Last weekend I was on a kid-free journey to North Carolina to visit that man of mine. Have I told you guys how amazing he is? Oh yeah, I did. Moving along… remember a few weeks ago I had some trouble with the SUV? Well, it started feeling like it was going to rattle apart on the interstate. I texted the man, “It’s doing the weird thing again.”
Immediately he called me. (He doesn’t text. I know-I’m not sure how it’s possible either.) “You’re joking, right?”
“Nope. It’s doing that weird shaking thing again,” I explained.
“Are you on the same stretch of interstate you were on the last time it did that?” he asked.
I tried to not be annoyed. “It’s not the road, sweetheart.”
He thought for a moment and so did I, taking his lead in trying to draw similarities between each incident of my car behaving badly. “I have been going about the same speed each time,” I remembered out loud.
“How fast?” he asked.
“Around ninety,” I answered.
Silence.
And then yelling.
“Ninety!?!”
“Hey, hey, hey! You’re sooo not one to talk!”
“You’re not supposed to do ninety in an Xterra. No wonder it feels like it’s going to fall apart! The wheels are only balanced to 85 mph!” he explained LOUDLY.
“Well, why does my speedometer go up to 120 mph if it can’t go 90?” I asked.
“You can’t go 90 because the speed limit is 70!”
I thought for a second. “What if we lived in Germany?”
I could see him frowning through the phone at my logic. “Babe, if we lived in Germany I’d buy you a damn sports car. Please slow the hell down!”
“OK!”
“Promise?”
“Sure.”
“eL.,” he scolded.
“OK, OK! I’ll slow down.”
I wanted to get there so that I could be with him and I almost shook the world out from under myself in trying to do so. The irony in this story almost overwhelms me. I progress in relationships in the same way that I drive… TOO DAMN FAST.
We’ve all been guilty of it (or so I tell myself in order to sleep better). It’s so easy to get caught up in the initial whirlwind of a relationship and over commit ourselves too quickly. There’s a fine line between love and lust that gets really blurry in the honeymoon phase of a new romance. Everything is new. Everything is exciting. Everything is better than it has ever been before! Then before you know it, you’re in “lurrve” and making plans. Sometimes those plans turn out OK and sometimes you find yourself shaking, naked on the bathroom floor at 3AM asking yourself, “How the hell did I wind up here?”
We’ve all heard about that couple who met and married in six weeks and lived sixty glorious years together, but they are not the norm. Reality is that when the road to happily ever after is navigated at 90 mph the ride is rough and incredibly dangerous. People get hurt; hearts get broken. I know because, more than once, it has been my foot on the pedal.
Forever is a really, really long time.
Why the rush?
Slow the hell down!
