In the office {next to our bedroom where I’m typing this}, Poor Kyle is humming the tune to Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours,” which is already about as sweet as it can be, but Poor Kyle adds in all kinds of runs and trills—he really fancies it up, and it’s just precious.  {As he’s reading this, he’s groaning and rolling his eyes, hoping none of his friends read my blog.}

You will probably never have the good fortune of hearing Poor Kyle sing—he’s incredibly shy about it, but he has a fantastic voice.  He even wrote me a song once, with guitar parts, and lyrics, and everything!  A real song. {Cue more groans—sorry, PK!}  It’s a lovely song, and I have a recording of it, but if I ever posted it on this blog, he would probably morph into an Incredible Hulk-ish Husband and strangle me in my sleep or something.  Well, he’s not violent, so that would be a stretch, but you get what I’m saying: he’d be MAD—no, he’d be MADD, with two Ds.  Really madd.

Mad like this—I see this expression more often than you might expect.

Anyway, the point is, Poor Kyle is a musical fellow, without even having any formal training.  In the time it’s taken me to write this, he has picked out riffs of “I’m Yours” and morphed them into a techno version of a different song altogether.  He could hum to himself this way for hours—and he does.  Parts of one song will remind him of another good tune, so he’ll start singing that, and then he’ll think, “I bet a whistle would sound really good with this,” so he throws in a couple of those.  He’ll drum his hands on his chest, the desk, his knees—any solid surface within reach will do.  If he’s working on the computer, he even clicks the mouse in beat to the rhythm of the moment.  It’s like he’s got an entire band inside his brain.  He goes on and on, and there’s really no telling where one song ends and another begins.  I don’t know how he gets any work done with all the tunes floating through his mind, but it must be what makes him tick.

It’s hard to take him seriously when he’s just so goofy.

I’m musical, too, but in a completely opposite way.  I compartmentalise.  When I’m being musical, I focus on the music; when I’m writing, I only write.  I can’t mesh the two together.  For example, if I’m trying to write a blog post, but there’s music playing on another blog’s playlist, I get totally distracted by the melodies and words trickling from my speakers, and can’t seem to think up any words of my own.  I don’t know how Poor Kyle can focus on html and xhtml and CSS and all that other technological nonsense, with the music in his mind running at exactly 120 beats per minute.

Also, I’ve taken piano lessons and flute lessons for as long as I can remember (well, not the flute anymore), and when I sit to learn a song, I’ve been taught to drill it into my brain.  No varying from the written music—no nuances.  I learn the songs how they’re written, and that’s that.  Poor Kyle, on the other hand, learns guitar chords off of YouTube™, and then puts them together in his own ways—ways that work.  I could no sooner improvise a lovely tune than I could squeeze juice from a novel, but Poor Kyle?  He’s a pro at it.

Like night and day, we are.

I hesitate to post this, because I know he’s going to read it and become insecure, thinking his quirkiness bothers me—but it doesn’t.  In a way, it’s symbolic of our lives together.  I’m intense about my life the same way I’m intense about my music: I play by the rules; I don’t really vary from the guidelines; I practise and practise (at music, at writing, at communicating, at losing weight), hoping that I’m improving in some small way.  You might think I’m easy-going just because I’m funny (ho, ho!), but really, I’m quite regimented.  I don’t like change or variations to my routines; I don’t improvise my music, and I don’t improvise my life [if I can avoid it].

Poor Kyle is 180° different—he’s laid back with his plans; he’s an extremely flexible, fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants sort of guy…

…though you’d never know it to look at him.

He makes changes in his life as easily as he can alter the songs in his head—one change after another, taking them all in stride.  His music never ends, and thank goodness: if the song ends, it will probably mean that he’s been around me for too long.  I like the song just how it is right this minute; and if it’s a little different in thirty seconds, I’ll like it then, too.

{I think I married exactly the right person for me.}

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