Happy and Sad, Sad and Happy...

It’s funny how the happiest times of your life can simultaneously be some of the saddest. The last few months of my life have been some of the greatest months known to me in the entirety of my twenty years. In the last few months the relationship that I am in has turned into something that I never thought I would be blessed with. I have had more fun and have been falling more in love with that person than I ever have with anyone else in my whole life. I love her more than even I will ever actually be able to comprehend and what’s funny is that everyone around us is excited. The excitement rolls from her parents and aunts and uncles to our friends and peers and counselors and all the way down to her second cousins who are less than ten, this is a really good thing and I don’t think that anything could stop it.
Laura and I met last spring, right at the end of August when I had just gotten out of a less than smoothly ended relationship and I knew full well that the typically wise thing to do after getting out of a semi-serious relationship is to give it some good time before you dive into another one and I had every intention of doing so until I saw her, in her green one piece bathing suit, squatted down on some steps on the telephone with a boy who turned out to be her older brother, thank GOD! We sat at that pool party and watched as everyone else swam and I read and she knitted. Despite the fact that we’d been speaking to one another for a total of about fifteen minutes we began to create this totally false, yet phenomenally realistic scenario that consisted of us being an old Catholic married couple watching our thirteen children (the other attendees at this pool party, all of them over 18) splash around in the pool and making comments about how proud we were of them. We hit it off immediately and tried like hell to avoid this ever becoming something serious because we were both terrified but despite our best efforts, we couldn’t help but be who we were and we couldn’t help feeling how we really felt about each other. We started dating about two months after that day.
We’ve had some pretty interesting times, some of them were grueling and miserable and the other were flawless and beautiful and everything that love is supposed to be when you’re young and realize that you’ve met the only person that you could ever really imagine spending the rest of your life with. We’ve never been more in love than we are right now and it will be the same tomorrow and I pray that it will be more “today” than it was “yesterday” for the rest of our lives. I said all that to say, I am definitely happy and have probably never been more so.
The other side to that story is that I am in Oregon and will most likely raise my children and love my wife here for the rest of my life. I am more than excited about that and have thought about it thoroughly and feel like I’ve chosen wisely but that doesn’t change the daunting fact that I am from Georgia and I am in Oregon and despite my best efforts, I cannot get those two damned states to move closer to one another, neither of them will stand for it which is probably ultimately a good thing because who wants to be in the Midwest?
As it would happen in my life, being that I have never had triumph when I have not also had to endure travesty, the entirety of my flesh and blood is across the United States of America. Every relative I have, every aunt, brother, mother, father, sister, nephew, niece, cousin (save for the one who temporarily sleeps on my futon) is in the Deep South and again, I am in Oregon with the one I love. Unfortunately, since they are there and I am here it is hard for them to express their glee to me when I announce that I’ve found the woman I want to marry in Oregon, which has made for an awful hard week for myself. I totally understand their dismay, they feel as though they’ve lost me, which I think they will see that they have not, I’m just a little less frequently in their presence and from their end it’s not looking any brighter, and on the other end this sweet, sweet girl of mine is saddened by the thought of my family not liking her because they could see this as her taking me from them, again, a very hard week for myself and seemingly everyone else around me. So anyway, as I sit here, off of a worthless day of work, drinking a less than decent beer, I thought I would share w/ you all why I am so happy and so sad. There is nowhere I can go that I will not be missing someone but in turn there is nowhere I can go that I will not be with someone I love. I think that I am a lucky man and I will not be dumb enough to forget to mourn over the absence of my family but I’m also not going to be blind enough to forget to celebrate the fact that I’m about to build one of my very own.

God Bless you, every last one.


Trippe Davis