Who's Afraid of Forever?

It sinks in more and more that I'm in it with Sam for the long haul. The longest-haul, really.

I realize this in small ways at least once a day, usually while we're on the phone, but now that I'm here in Tucson, there's a sort of reckoning of it all, and the realization that that all those small ways add up to something much larger than their simple sum. Such is the mathematics of Love, I suppose, or the physics of it. Whatever.

All I know is that the laws of conservation of mass, momentum, energy, do not apply when emotional wealth can be created by two people in love. Feeling that things get better just adds to the getting-better, a real payoff in real-world metrics.

I realized that the more concretely finite the remainder of my life becomes to my own mind, the more freely the Infinite can be applied. It sounds counter-intuitive, even flat-out contradictory, but it's true. That fixed point somewhere near or far in the future represents the only absolute I'm willing to countenance. The universe may be moving that point about, but to me it's still the fixed point upon which my pendulum hangs (no snickering).

In the face of the absolute, infinity appears. And you can measure it: what may be 50 years to someone else may very well be infinite to me.

And in my infinite time left, I know in this very moment that I want it all spent with Sam.

When gay men (straight men, too) have panic attacks because of what they might be missing by 'settling down', why do they never wonder what they'll be missing if they don't?