Gone - Part 7 (final)

It's been six months now since my mother left.  She's gone.  But Peter stayed.

"What reason would I have to go anywhere?" he asked me.

I've tried to ask him questions about the future, about where he's from, about his own family as well as what he knows of my own, but he won't answer me.

"I didn't dig into your lineage," he says.  "I'm glad I didn't, because no one should know too much about their own future."

I know what he means by that.  He wants to be a part of my future, my current future, not just my distant future.  Peter has fallen in love with me over and over again.  I felt I owed it to him to see if I could fall in love with him, too, just this once.

And so far its good.  I can see why another version of myself nearly married this man.  He's smart and funny and handsome, all the typical stuff you look for.

But his intelligence is more than just knowledge.  It's this awkward sort-of intuitiveness that came from living the same life a dozen times.  That makes him unique in a way that no other human could claim to be.  Sometimes its intimidating, but there is so much I can learn from him.  How often do you get a literal second chance multiple times following a failure?

His humor is odd.  He sometimes makes references to things I've never heard of, things that won't be invented for a hundred years, but he doesn't mind that I don't get it.  It doesn't make him sad.  And he doesn't try to explain it unless I want him to.  And he gets things from today, too.  He appreciates his past, which is now his present, in a way that I'm not sure I could.  He appreciates me.  He finds me just funny enough, and I feel the same way about him.

His interests are sometimes peculiar, but he also takes an interest in things I love and he teaches me to love new things.  That's a quality that transcends time, I think.

So yeah, it's pretty good.  I started out feeling this strange obligation to give it a shot, and now I think I might really be falling in love.

If he were gone, I know I could survive, I know I could go on.  I lived for decades without my mother.  I've learned not to rely too heavily on any one person.  But it's nice having him around and I think, that for the foreseeable future, I would really like for him to stay.