Page 140 of I Dreamt That You Loved Me
This wasyou, not some stranger with the same name.
Apparently, I was rude to Cleo the first time we met eight years ago, almost to the day.
I sounded like an asshole, but it got better…then worse…then better again.
Plenty of ups and downs and a few plateaus, but a riveting read, nonetheless.
Cleo wasn’t one for sugarcoating and didn’t wrap it all up in a pretty bow. She laid it all out there. The good, the bad, the ugly, the bitter and sweet. The arguments and petty grievances and the compromises required in a relationship when two strong-willed people build a life together.
But through it all there was a deep, abiding love so strong and pure that it transcended all my visions of what true love really looked like.
It was all the little, seemingly inconsequential things that spoke volumes (her words, not mine).
When I served her coffee in bed.
When I massaged her feet after she’d been running around in heels all day.
When she was angry that another designer was churning out cheap knock-offs of her designs, and I listened to her rant (andoffered to go after the slimeball and put a stop to it) even though I’d just spent fourteen hours in the recording studio.
When I took the red-eye from LA to New York to surprise her at her first runway show and had to get right back on a plane the next morning to perform that night.
Love was in the details.
I went back and reread a line.
I used to love to watch him sleeping, and I would always marvel at how lucky and grateful I was simply because he existed.
Imagine having someone love you so much that they were grateful for your very existence.
Imagine.
I laughed at the list of things I did that drove her nuts: Dog-eared the pages of my books. Woke up in the middle of the night (on numerous occasions!) because I had a song running through my head and needed to work on itright that minute. Ate Doritos in bed and left a trail of orange crumbs. Wrote To-Do lists and promptly lost them.
I sighed when I read about our first kiss. Our first time. The first time we saidI love you.
And nearly cried during the final chapter. The lychees on New Year’s Day. The rubies I’d collected for her engagement ring. The vows we’d exchanged in my hospital room.
I read the final pages, pouring over the words like I was mining for gold.
It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but it was honest, and it was good, and it was ours. Gabriel taught me so much aboutlove. He was always so good at it. I think it’s because he was never scared to jump off a cliff without a parachute.
He was braver than me in that way. While I was always more guarded, he made himself so open and exposed and vulnerable and lived with (sometimes) reckless abandon.
An emotional risk-taker.
With his music.
With his life.
With me.
I guess that’s why they call it falling in love. It’s like a trust fall. You have to put your faith in the other person and believe they’ll always be there to catch you. And for a long time, I did.
I believed in him. I trusted him. I took the leap.
But that was then, and this is now…
If we were two strangers with no history and we’d just met, I would want to know him better. But I wouldn’t be so quick to roll the dice and gamble it all on us.
