Sally Is Engaged. That’s Me.

I love Charles Bukowski. He’s my favorite poet. If you know anything about Charles Bulowski, you know that he was a little bit of a misogynistic, alcoholic, for lack of a better term, asshole. But I’m good at separating the art from the artist. And he GOT it.

In Bukowski’s poem “The Crunch”, he starts off with the most badass line of any poem to date (in my opinion).

“there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movements of the hands of a clock.”

I read that for the first time when I was 14, and 10 years later I still think about it. Because he’s right. There is a loneliness in everyone. Everyone longs to be seen, to feel like they matter, to feel like they’re doing something important. And time? It moves so slowly, but somehow we still don’t have enough of it to feel okay.

Ronaldo proposed on a trip to the beach last week. I knew he was going to, mostly because he sucks at keeping secrets and also because it’s hard to get anything past me. The ring is gorgeous. Nyx said “its like you if you turned into a ring” and I completely agree. It’s real diamond- not lab grown, which I told him I would’ve been fine with. He could’ve proposed with a ring pop and the answer would still be yes. But Ronaldo wanted the real thing. We are the real thing. Marriage is going to be work, which I’ve never been fond of. But what we have is real. We’re committed to doing life together.

I love him. He’s a great guy who I am probably going to have a long, beautiful life with, God willing. He’s handsome and sweet and charming and he’s done the work on himself.

I can’t see myself being a wife, or a fiancé for that matter. Before I popped Blu out, I couldn’t see myself being a mother. I never wanted it. It was a blessing in disguise, but it’s not what I wanted. I wanted to travel, to have a job that meant something to me and to others that I was passionate about, to eat pasta on a gondola in Venice and be able to paint and write dumb books for fun and leave everything that held me back behind.

Now that I think about it- that’s lonely. The clock would move slower, and it would be oh so lonely without MY people. My point is that maybe what I thought that I wanted, wouldn’t have fulfilled me as much as what God and the universe knew that I needed.

When I think back to when I had that freedom, before I had Blu and the world was at my feet, I wasn’t who I wanted to be, either. That’s because, left to our own devices, humans are silly creatures. We’ll squander and waste time because we think we have more of it, because the clock moves slowly, because that’s the illusion. But fate always intervenes. It saves us, mostly, from the slow movements of the hands of the clock.

So one day, I may eat spaghetti on a boat in Italy. But right now, I’m watching rom coms with my little sister, and shopping for a house right down the road from my grandmother, in the town that I swore I’d leave behind one day, and I am many things, but lonely is not one of them.

Life is funny like that.

XOXO, Sally in her fiancé era.