The week with all the Alabama & a settled sort of love.

On Friday  I flew to Atlanta, rented a car, and drove the 3.5 hours to Enterprise, Alabama where Andrew lives. I drove back to Atlanta and flew home Monday and then tomorrow I’m doing it all again, because Friday is family day, which means I get to see Andrew fly around and take photos with the aircraft he’s currently learning to fly on, and we didn’t know it was family day when we booked the original trip for this past weekend and, when I looked into changing my flight, we realized it would cost almost the same to change my flight as it would to just come the second weekend, so we said fuck it, like honey badgers, and booked the second trip and this became the week with ALL THE ALABAMA and ALL THE DRIVING.

Andrew’s lucky I really, really like him or I probably wouldn’t be up for spending the days surrounding two consecutive weekends speeding down Alabama byways, past cows and horses and broken down farmhouses.

This trip was mostly uneventful. I got in Friday night, we went to sleep, we went to town on Saturday, where Andrew studied his flight school things and I read my book and blogs and googled my way around the internet and later we Red Boxed Pitch Perfect, ordered a pizza and snuggled on the couch. Sunday Andrew studied, I ran an exceptionally challenging 4 miles through his insanely hilly neighborhood, cooked Super Bowl food and we watched the game on the couch until bedtime. Monday I woke up early, drove back to Atlanta, and caught a noontime flight home.

I told Andrew over and over before I arrived that I knew he had to study flight school things and that just being near him was enough, even if it meant being near each other and doing different things, but I was more than a little surprised to find out how satisfying it was to sit across a table from him outside a local coffee shop, each of us immersed in our own things, but still together and close. It felt, in those moments, like this was all normal, like this was how our weekends are always spent: together, close & simply.

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Last Thursday, when discussing the merits of marriage and various relationship things, a close friend said, matter-of-factly, that Andrew and I are soul mates. It’s not something she would ever say lightly, but for us, it was the only words that worked and they came to her so easily when describing us that I was taken aback, in the best way, because no matter what nice things friends manage to say about our marriage or relationship, I’m always surprised by what they see, that even to people I don’t know well or even at all, we, me and him, are supposed to be, and I guess that’s just one more reason why I don’t mind driving back and forth from Atlanta to Enterprise a handful of times this week.

It also doesn’t hurt that he’s so damn adorable.