A Snapshot of Skylar

Before one can begin to understand the problems and associated complications in someone else’s life, one must have a starting place, an idea of the current state of things for comparison with the changed state. So before I dive into ranting, raving, complaining, and otherwise fascinating and torturing the reader, I’ll take a moment to give you a little bit of background. Not enough, of course, to positively identify me, but just enough…

I’ve been with my boyfriend, Kevin, for just shy of two years now, and have lived with him for about half of that. I came into his life as his last ex was leaving, and let’s just say that no matter how annoying I may be some days, her memory makes me look like an angel. It doesn’t really matter what it was that she did or didn’t do, just that any reasonable person would be hard-pressed to do worse.

The good timing was mutual, though. Kevin came into my life as I was on the precipice of a very great fall – no, scratch that, I was already falling. I had jumped off a proverbial cliff a few months earlier in dumping my last ex. Now don’t get me wrong, I can take care of myself…but I jumped into something I knew little about and consequentially wasn’t much prepared for. Encountering him in my free-fall was literally a life-saving blessing. If I hadn’t, I might well not be alive today, and no matter how many times I thank him for that, I will always owe him one more.

For a while I thought that perhaps I had simply hit the bottom of the cliff and been lucky with who I found at the bottom, but things weren’t really bad enough for that to have been the case. It wasn’t until some time later that I realized the very bottom would have meant my death.

Kevin and I went farther faster than I ever could have imagined, and I don’t mean that in any kind of sexual way, but emotionally. I never thought I had it in me to fall so fast or so hard for someone, or to be so completely free of doubt about any aspect of our relationship. My longest relationship to date was about three years, but I had never trusted in that one the way I did in mine with Kevin after only a couple of months. The feeling of knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have found your soulmate and life partner can be compared to nothing. I was never so happy.

I was vaguely apprehensive about moving in with him when I did, since that was what had begun the downhill slide of me and my ex, but it couldn’t have worked better. We agreed on almost everything, and the few things we disagreed on were easily solved. It was another sign that we were fated to be together, because living with someone is more telltale than anything.

Since I may have made it sound otherwise: yes, Kevin and I are still together. We’ve settled into our domestic routine, an idea that would have viscerally horrified my teenage self, but that I don’t find quite so objectionable anymore. We work, I take classes, we cook, we clean, we watch TV. I seem to have skipped from my mid-twenties to my mid-forties. Back when I was a full-time undergraduate, the excitement of the week could have been anything from a drinking party to a fist-fight to a car crash to my roommates dating or breaking up. These days, it’s getting the oil changed in my car, or getting a particularly good photo of a sunset. Oh, and our somewhat-weekly foray to a local nightclub.

Though I and my friends have scattered to various corners of the country as friends do after school, we managed to keep in touch, through the internet and occasionally face-to-face. While some of them are probably amused that the ultimate symbol of teenage rebeldom from high school has been domesticated, they like Kevin and I know they're happy for me.

I was shocked to discover that I could enjoy this sort of life, find real happiness and pleasure in being comfortable and complacent. At least, that’s what I thought I had discovered.