Soul Mate

He was my soul mate.

We met in 1984, when he cast me in a play at the Sam Bass Theatre. He was so passionate about theater, and so confident that I could play the role he had cast me in, that, carried along on the wave of his enthusiasm, I gave a fairly creditable performance. He gave me a card at the end of the show--a tradition among community theater directors--that said I shone in the role.

We were friends. When I was short on rent one month, I asked him for help, and he pulled out this huge can of quarters that we sat in a bar, rolling them, until the waitress asked us what was up. He spun her some story that we were going to Vegas...

When an ex kicked in my front door, it was Jim I called to ask if he could fix it. He came right over.

After his divorce, he went through several years of dating women younger, prettier and smarter than I. I gave up on thinking he would ever be interested in me, other than as a friend. I frequently worked with him at the theater, in shows he was directing, or stage managing for him, or being his assistant director. Any opportunity to spend time with him, and participate in his love of theater and edgy intelligence and wicked humour was heaven for me.

Oddly enough, I thought for many years that I was the best person for him. That day in the Autumn of 1997, when he began to realize it, too, was one of the happiest in my life.

Two years later, just after he returned from a long trip with his mother, he asked me to marry him, looking at me with a hesitant intensity, as if there might be some question as to whether I would accept. There was none. No hesitation whatsoever. When I first started helping him out at school; making costumes or critiquing contest performances, the kids would ask me if I was going to marry Mr. Prior, and how long I had known him. When I told them, "Fifteen years," they looked at me oddly. I would add, "We don't like to rush things." and they would walk away, shaking their heads.

His mom treated me like the daughter she never had, and gave me the priceless gift of her love and acceptance.

Things have been rough since she died, emotionally and in other ways, too, yet it never occurred to me that something might come up that we could not weather together.

I don't know what to do. I am lost.