A Girl...

Crush

Here's a short, overly symbolic photo essay on what it's been like with Simon away.

This is Broadway Tower.

When we were roadtripping through the Cotswolds during our visit to England last August, we got lost somewhere between Stratford and Oxford and ended up taking a country road that deadended atop a hill with this miniature castle. >Its website makes it seem like a tourist hotspot, but when we were there the shack that stood for a visitors center looked abandoned and the tower itself was padlocked. It was just us and the wind and a guy with his dog, neither of whom seemed to be there for the tower but for the wide expanses of rabbited grass on the surrounding land. According to official documents, we had unwittingly achieved the second highest point in the region, which explains why we could see for miles and miles and miles and miles (or kilometers and kilometers, as it were).

Here's me performing Fame! in front of the tower.

That's one of a series of jumping shots taken as I pranced across the lawn narrowly avoiding twisted-ankle-via-rodent-hole several times. I know you can't see my face at all, but my body language sure suggests happiness, yes? I was happy. It was a fun day, just me and Simon on the road with an inadequate map and nowhere to be; the tower was just one of several surprises we happened upon during the day's travels. I didn't get any shots of Simon with the tower--I was too busy spazzing out, unfettered and startlingly acrobatic without the usual camera poundage hanging off my shoulder.

Here's a shot we took before getting back in the car to head in the general direction of home. We set the timer and placed the camera on a weathered picnic table that had Simon's real name carved into the wood.

I thought of it as our "on top of the world" shot, expecting that the background wouldn't be so hazy and washed out as it ended up being in the jpg, and that you could see the gridwork of farms and row crops and orchards down below. We look like we'd conquered something, don't we? perhaps hiked for many hours to crest that hilltop instead of merely drove a rental car past a lifetime's worth of Cheddar cows and gotten lost. I'm not usually one to mug for the camera--most pictures of me lack any sign of personality because I tend to just throw on a safe smile and try not to squint my eyes--but after all those the leaping shots earlier, this was my idea of doing something wild and crazy. Hey, I never claimed to be exciting.

"Okay, now let's take a real picture," Simon said after we got the shot. I wasn't sure what he meant. We set the timer, took our places, and then he grabbed me and hugged me to him in a comfortable crush. The other pictures were fun to take and are fun to have--the beautiful view, the solo spazzing, the act put on for the camera--but I like this one the best. (That's the symbolic part.)

Simon comes home tomorrow and not a day too soon. Finally I'll have someone to change the lightbulb in the 13-foot ceiling, someone to chop the garlic (four days later and I can still smell it on my fingertips; ick), someone to snooze the alarm clock when it harrasses me from across the room, someone to call after an earthquake shakes the building, someone to squeeze my hand when I cry twice during Gilmore Girls, including once during the preview for next week's show. Mostly, though, I'm looking forward to that comfortable crush, the full-body squeeze that says, "Hey, it was fun to run around by yourself for awhile and put on a little show, but now it's time to be together, to be what we are when nobody's looking." He's right; it's time.