Time and Love

I'm thinking about time. About the fact I'm a year off on the length of my relationship. About my friend whose dad passed away a year ago. About how I have no idea how I'm going to pull these thoughts together into a coherent piece of writing.

Maybe my thesis statement is simply this: time is a fucked up thing.

I realized yesterday I've been dating Boyfriend for two years, not three. I just lost a year. Or gained one, depending on how you look at it.

Boyfriend and I moved slowly towards love and it took about a year for us to get from Just Friends to Boyfriend-Girlfriend. Our 'slow as molasses' approach, however, is completely different than The Mark Hopkins Experience.

Which has nothing to do with romance, but everything to do with ALS.

See, Boyfriend and I met at Betty's Run for ALS three years ago. Boyfriend's aunt has been living with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) for something like fifteen years, and we run this race every year. My friend Mark Hopkins' father, Doug, died of ALS last June after only eleven months with this disease. Four days after his dad's death, Mark ran his first Betty's Run.

So, I'm thinking about time, yes, but also love. And how some loves unfold slowly and others are like freight trains.

Sunday was Betty's Run – Boyfriend and my third 'Meet-iversary' and pretty much the first anniversary of Doug Hopkins' death. I ran with his son. We spent 54 minutes together – more time than we'd ever spent, just me and him. Thirty-two hundred seconds running and talking and connecting as human beings.

Maybe it's because I knew the context. And maybe it's because I'm a runner and Mark Hopkins isn't (yet), but I wanted to make those 54 minutes good for him. I gave him all the energy I possibly could – staying totally, completely present with him during that run. I also bounced up and down like some aerobics teacher-Chihuahua cross, pointed to the top of the huge hill and chirped, "It's right there! It's right there! You can do this."

I have no idea what those 54 minutes meant to Mark Hopkins. Maybe he was thinking about his dad the whole time, maybe he was trying not to. Maybe he wished Chihuahua Girl would piss off. But I hope not. Because that time meant a lot to me.

Mark Hopkins was the second highest individual fundraiser for the event. The only fundraising most of us knew about was his big birthday bash last weekend. It raised $1100. So, Mark quietly raised ten grand without anyone else noticing. And in our 54 minutes, he never mentioned it once.

I feel really grateful today. In fact, I'm a freaking mess writing this right now because I feel so grateful to have spent 54 minutes with someone whose force of love was that powerful, that humble...that magnificent.

I've got time with a person that I love. Time that Mark Hopkins no longer has with his dad. So I figure I'm lucky. And I better not screw it up.

We've got time and we've got love. Both stretch and shrink and get bent out of shape. And I don't know whether time will help you if you're running out of love. But if you're running out of time, here's my advice: add more love.