Never met a metaphor I didn't like

I am taking a day off on Monday. This is odd. I have, since I began my current job two years ago, taken only two days off. I am adjusting to the idea slowly, and finding it not entirely unpleasant.

The Remix and I are spending the day together; doing nothing in particular. We may go shopping for a suit (I don't own one, or at least not a whole one, and this seems like a situation I should remedy.) We may spend all day drinking wine and making out like high schoolers playing hooky. We may go see a movie. We may even just curl up at opposite ends of the couch, legs entwined, reading books and chasing away cats. It doesn't matter to me. Her presence is relaxing, a whole uninterrupted weekday is tantamount to a two week vacation for me.

Four days from now will be the one year anniversary of my divorce. It's been a surprising year. I fell in love, which I hadn't anticipated. I didn't get depressed, which I had both anticipated and dreaded. Being prone to depression is hard to explain to anyone who's not had the experience. It's a little like walking on an icy sidewalk--you know there's a good chance you're falling on your ass, but until you feel the cold seeping through your pants you don't even realize you've slipped. For a while, I drank too much, flirted with the wrong girls, made just a few too many jokes with that uncomfortable edge that everyone can see right through. I could have slipped, but I didn't. I pulled myself up, tiptoed carefully for a while, and eventually the danger passed.

The Remix was waiting at the other end of the sidewalk. Tall and beautiful, aching to be loved, and generous with her second chance. The timing was perfect--any sooner, I'd have been too fragile for this to work; any later and I might have been too calloused to give it a real chance. To say that she's everything my ex-wife was not would be unfair, to both of them and myself. There is no comparison, and to attempt to qualify her as juxtaposition to someone else is both senseless and cruel. The things my ex-wife did wrong were not entirely her fault. We didn't fit together, period, and for all our good intentions our attempts to mesh were doomed to end in grinding gears and a cloud of noxious smoke.

The Remix fits. Her intelligence, her beauty, her grace, her varied and impressive talents--all the things that make her an incredible and unique individual--make sense to me. They fit my idea of a life, and of a person to share it with. She makes me better, without ever making me feel bad about who I am. It's not a sense of completion, exactly. It's more like infinite potential. We're not good because of who we were before we met. We're good because of who we can be because we're together.