Feelin' It

There is this hidden grove next to the train tracks near the boat landing where I grew up that would turn into a free candy store once a year. It contained a raspberry patch that only my friends and I seemed to know about, where we would gorge ourselves on buckets of glorious ripe raspberries once every summer. I remember how exhilarating it was to discover a few weeks into summer that the raspberries had come in, and our annual berry bacchanal would begin right then and there. We would eat half our weight in raspberries in one gluttonous afternoon, eventually coming home with our hands and mouths stained blood red from the juice, looking like little vampires.

That’s kind of how it feels to be dating Frenchy. Instead of raspberries, I’m gorging myself on his appreciation. Buckets and buckets of appreciation. After having lived through the long appreciation drought more commonly referred to as "my shitty marriage," I am mainlining his appreciation like an emotional junkie. Being appreciated again by the man in my life is like getting oxygen when you're asthmatic, or hearing Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" after a week-long roadtrip with only Top 40 radio playing the same ten songs over and over in a relentless lobotomize-me-now loop. It's invigorating. Although it’s always nice to be appreciated for anything, it is *particularly* gratifying to feel appreciated for qualities I like and actively cultivate in myself. While it feels "nice" to be appreciated for, say, my good hygiene or my neat handwriting, I will swoon if you appreciate me for making you laugh.

It's not just about hearing those words though. Frenchy shows me his appreciation in other ways too. I feel it when he wants to spend more time with me than I have to give him. I feel it when he sends me a photo of the beautiful pond in the park where he walks his dog. I feel it when he wants to eat dinner with me every night. I feel it when he reaches for my hand and holds it for the rest of the play we're watching. I feel it when he asks for my opinion. I feel it when he touches my hair. I feel it when I remember a name he can't quite recall. I feel it when he looks at me and actually sees a flesh-and-blood woman, not just a piece of talking furniture that is so annoying when it asks questions and tries to start a conversation.

I’m digging it in a big way. If appreciation stained like raspberry juice, I would look redder than a chainsaw-wielding serial killer in a Quentin Tarantino film.