wholes and parts.

When you get to be thirty-one years old and have yet to find that one person to share your life with (or rather, when you find the person to share your life with only to realize that the lives you're trying to intertwine are so wildly and insanely opposing in nature that you risk collapsing the universe in the attempt, prompting you to each skulk tearfully back into your respective corners), you start to justify things. I should probably take a moment here to reassure you that I am by no means unhappy on my own--far from it. It's just not where I saw myself when I was younger. Coincidentally, it's not where most other people saw me either, whether they knew me well or not. The lone wolf lifestyle is anathema to a lot of people's perception of what's worth dreaming about, which means I often find myself explaining to other people that really, I'm okay, and I don't sit at home by myself eating can after can of Campbell's Healthy Request Soup, praying for a suitor. (This sort of justification is probably largely the symptom of my work environment, which is populated on both sides of the reference desk with well-intentioned and wonderful women of a certain age.) Anyway, a funny thing happens when you're defending your life choices on a regular basis: You actually start to believe that you're in the right place, and that you may have actually done things for the right reasons.

One of the epiphanies that's been coming to me over and over these days is that while I might not have found my soul mate, I found something much better: a whole string of them. Serial monogamists are a lucky breed: we get to fall in love over and over again, collecting keepsakes and sweet cargo along the way. (Also crippling emotional baggage and additional copies of books and albums that you never really liked in the first place, but that's not what this post is about.) Here are a few of my more fortunate treasures.

1. A personalized NASA Space Camp souvenir pin. Seriously, it has my name on it, and it is incredible. Gifted by the first boy I ever fell in love with, who snagged it while on a highschool orchestra trip. And yes, I recognize that placing a Space Camp pin in the same category of some of the other things on this list might seem ridiculous, but when you have a hard-to-spell name, this sort of thing really MATTERS.

2. A solid year spent traipsing across Devonshire Place, away from my own room at St. Hilda's and toward my then-boyfriend's never-dull all-boys dorm, where we'd brush our teeth side by side under the wise beacon of a Hooters calendar and huddle and cuddle ourselves to sleep in one very tiny single bed, every blessed night. I've never been a good sleeper, but those nights, I always nodded off fast, in a tangle of limbs, to the sound of his nightly promise that we'd see each other again in a couple of hours. He was nearly always right; back then we populated each other's dream lives as much as our waking ones.

3. Late nights spent noodling around on not one but two adjacent Steinway pianos in a fire-warmed living room in the middle of nowhere. Helping to house-sit for some criminally irritating neighbours had its perks. If there is a better feeling than playing After the Gold Rush on a grand piano as a man you think you just might care about puts his arms around your shoulders, I have not found it.



4. Sitting up with a start in the half-light of an early winter morning and struggling to get your bearings in an unfamiliar room, steeling yourself for the day ahead. Turning at the touch of a warm hand on your back, and looking down at a smiling face on the pillow next to yours.

"You have a beautiful back," he tells you. "If I could paint a picture of it, I would."

"Stoner," you reply affectionately, nervously, noticing your heart jump up into your throat, hoping your blush doesn't betray that deep-down, terrifying feeling that this is Something.

Sometimes the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but sometimes the parts do a pretty grand job of covering the spread.