This was the song that was playing the first time I walked into my trailer and turned on the stereo right after I bought it. I didn’t think much of it, like I didn’t think much of the original booklet in my truck saying (other than the fact that an original booklet was still in a 2003 truck) “Sport Trac turns on the charm whenever you want it. Like when it’s just you and….well, you decide.” And when uncle Steve questioned me one day at Sunday dinner at the ranch about doing this alone, and again when his mother-in-law was concerned as we ate by the fire because ‘it’s good to have company when doing these big things’ and again when Robert showed up a month later to help put a new roof on the horse barn while escaping the Michigan winter and said he gave me credit to do what I was doing alone because he felt he’d want a partner and as I floated in the pool and considered what he was saying, I took the credit because I felt I needed no one. Interesting…..

And now here I am, days after celebrating a 3-month anniversary with a man who seems to embrace the lifestyle I’ve chosen and adores me as I do it. Sometimes other people seem to know you before you do….and they tell you, to prepare you for what’s coming. The day we met on the beach, Paula, whom I’d known for about a week, asks me if I knew him already as she walks up to join me and he walks away to get me wine for the sunset. “I only just met him,” I answer. To which she says, “That’s not what your auras say. They’re the same color.” She still loves to tell people about the golden glow, the “mustard colored burst of light” she saw when she walked up to us at my beach towel. She was trying to tell me that he, that we, were going to be something and I was trying to tell her that he, we, would not. I had just had one of those very touching yet very incredulous bare-your-soul conversations with the lady at the stretchy jewelry booth about the love of my life back in Wisconsin who broke my heart. We joined over the idea that we were mermaids blown off course,, somehow ending up being born in the middle of the country, far from our natural habitat of water and how we had both had great loves that didn’t work out and the only reason we could fathom was because we wouldn’t be doing what we were doing now. I found some peace in that, as I did in her words, “maybe you’ll see him again when you go back to Wisconsin.”

Oh, if I could find her now; that operating system is in desperate need of an upgrade. She was on the very edge of the market that I’d come to see Paula at, at her suggestion, and a stone’s throw away from the café and the man I was about to meet who would change my mind. And my path. The man who talks about watching movies in his truck on the beach in the rain. The man who after sleeping until 5pm after Gasparilla the first time I stayed at this place in Tampa colored my hair for me. A man who says, “It’s your whole energy that jazzes me.” Someone who’s seen me too hungry, too tired and too drunk and expresses the same thing in each version of me not at my finest, “I got you.” He’s gone rug shopping with me at Wal-mart at midnight and when someone tries to weave through the aisle where I’ve spread out all the possibilities he says, “we’re just trying to see which one flies.” He yells, “Go deep, Starfish!” as he raises the carton of soy milk like a football.

And that he calls me Starfish. It started as starfruit, my favorite thing to eat at the time and reminding me that I was no longer in the Midwest, but that transformed. Because he found me on the beach and felt that the tide must have washed me in, he can think of no other explanation. I too find it incredulous when I wonder all the things that needed to line up for him and I to cross paths. He says he thinks about it every day he goes to work and looks out at that spot.

My co-addict in late night runs to Starbuck’s for Smoked Butterscotch Lattes and hazelnut croissants and as I lean over to order he kisses my shoulder and strokes my back. He gets me (I was beginning to wonder if anyone ever would), I know because he tells my Caramom when she asks him how he feels about my gypsy life, “I’m just trying to caress her, not cage her.” He sings “I really like your peaches wanna shake your tree” to me as he pulls me close later that same night at the Palm Pavilion at Clearwater Beach which runs a tight second to the night he sang “Darling Nikki” as he leaned over the railing of the café where he works one night holding me while I bent over backwards and looked up at the palm trees swaying in the wind as I swayed, looking up at the starry night sky. He sounded so close to Prince I had to ask if I could fantasize that I was with him when we were between my purple sheets. He was, after all, my first true love….the one who wrote songs about how I thought it should be too.

And now I have it and I’m so glad I didn’t compromise and I’m so glad I waited. I wanted something amazing with someone who wanted something amazing too. I don’t need companionship because I’m uncomfortable being alone and I’m not trying to fill some empty space so I can feel complete. Like someone says in the book Quirkyalone; A Manifesto For Hopeless Romantics, “I’d rather be alone in anticipation of something awesome happening than involved in something that doesn’t make me happy.” I must be amazing too because it’s all coming from me. “An outside picturing of an inward condition,” A Course In Miracles says. This relationship lifts me and I lift him.