Wylde at Heart

@HellionHannah

My Hannah,

Words pale in comparison to the feelings that I have for you.  No amount of flourish used could describe how just being near you makes my heart accelerate, how sometimes when you look at me,  I feel as if a thousand butterflies are fluttering in my stomach at once.  When I look at you, sometimes I can not only see the present, but catch a glance of the future.  No words on paper can explain how I feel when I’m wrapped in your arms, content, safe and completely loved.  I can’t explain the passion, the desire, the feeling of just knowing what is right… that I have found that here, with you.

You rob me of my words and you steal my breath, but you give me so much more.  It is my dream to give you everything beautiful that you have given to me – to show you each day, in everything that I do, that I treasure, appreciate, respect and love you beyond the meaning of each word.

Thank you for coming into my life.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Hannah. I love you so, so very much.

-Ryder

My step-dad pickup was his baby.  Although he was a quiet man and didn’t seem to really care what was going on around him, he made sure to take extra special care of her.  Every Saturday afternoon when he wasn’t working, anyone could find him washing or waxing, changing the oil or giving her a tune up in our front yard.  I don’t know if he genuinely cared about me or if it was his care for my mother that prompted him, but on a Sunday afternoon during a heat wave in my fifteenth summer, he placed her keys in my hand. 

My step-dad, inarticulate as he is with humans, muttered something about teaching me how to drive and I must have lit up inexplicably.  I’d been waiting for that moment for a long time.  Driving was my chance at freedom, my chance to escape what felt like the inescapable – the confines of the town, of my family and of myself. 

Between my first overconfident drive in the pickup, which coincided with an off the road adventure that left my stepdad in a something that I now recognize as a panic attack, and my last drive along the legendary Route 66 in a vintage and terribly maintained Aston Martin that breathed its last weary breath as red and orange burned across the sky in the Arizona desert, I had known a few vehicles.  I partially remember sharing a hippie van with my friend, Jenny, along with a string of other cars that had probably lived long after their prime.  Purchasing a new vehicle, though?  It wasn’t something I had done.

After my discussion with Hannah about Dracula Night, I realized it was time.  After days of deliberation between this car and another with a little less power and finesse, and after contemplating specifications that I didn’t really understand and weasling car salesmen whose insincere affections were lost to my crystal clear view of them, I saw it.  Sleek, onyx, fast.  This car would be work.  No, it would more than work.

Although I doubt I’ll give up strolling the city streets with camera in hand, as I’ve been doing since London, I finally have a true means of transportation…  fast transportation.  I can finally take my girlfriend out on a date or even leave town with her of my own volition (as long as she’s a willing participant, of course…). ;)