The past two weeks I’ve been on a trip – a week with my folks in Virginia, and as this posts, I’m finishing up another week in the UK visiting my new guy’s family.

I am sad that Mike and I didn’t travel more together. We did visit my family in Virginia a few times, and he was mesmerized by the place – the lush vegetation, the history – the fireflies. But honestly, after we moved to Hawaii in 2001 we didn’t leave the state very often together. The first few years our business kept us here, and then later, when his work took him back and forth to Oahu, he was just too tired from it all, and missing the Big Island too much, to want to go anywhere else.

I used to ask him, tongue in cheek because I always knew the answer, where he wanted to go for a vacation. He would look at me with that familiar twinkle in his eye, strum another chord on his ukulele, and say: Hawaii.

We did sometimes talk about seeing the world together though. We dreamed of going to Spain, where his father’s family came from; I wanted to take him to Germany, where I had studied. I always wanted to see Venice. And we both longed to see Scotland. But we just never got around to it before he died.

So I headed out on this trip with very mixed emotions. I am excited to see a part of the world so far away from my home. It’s nice to get away from the usual routine once in awhile, and I do enjoy the company of the new guy in my life. But I can’t help but also wish I could have gone with Mike. I wish we would have gone when he was still alive; I wish he hadn’t died so that we could still make plans.

Is it wrong to feel this way? It is so strange that the feeling of grief seems to coexist with the seemingly opposite feeling of looking forward to something. When I sit and meditate on my feelings I realize they do tend to mute each other a little. I’m not quite as sad as I might be if I didn’t have something to look forward to. And I am not quite as excited about this journey as I might be if I didn’t miss Mike so much.

Maybe, this is just how things are going to be. Maybe forever, maybe just for awhile. I really have no idea.