Sometimes, when something big or important is happening, some little part of you maybe has the presence of mind to take a picture. Not a real picture–not “real” in the typical sense, with glossy paper and colors distorted by faulty printers or over-processing–but real. A captured moment. A mental snapshot whose exact image blurs as our perspectives shift, but whose feeling becomes such a piece of us that it is embedded in the timeline of self that we keep tucked away in the quiet places of our hearts.
There were lots of those the year I turned twenty.
There was a fluorescent-lit indoor basketball court half-filled with folding tables, a boy carving a pumpkin who made me laugh in a way I maybe hadn’t laughed since I’d left home for college a few years before. Like someone had flipped a switch and turned a light on inside me. Made me feel something. Curiosity. Hope. Just… something very new.
There were endless whispered jokes and more laughter, giggling, maybe disrupting everyone else who was seriously watching Flightplan in the movie theater when that boy and I ended up on a not-date that turned out to maybe actually have been a date.
There was, another day, a kiss that was too precious, too sweet and right and everything for it to really be a memory sharable with anyone else. The perfect one.
There were phone calls, daily, where I would smile and laugh and talk, and then sometimes be abandoned for an airing of CSI. (College students often didn’t have DVRs back then. And internet streaming did not exist. I’m not kidding.)
There was the sound of my cell phone from all the way across my parents’ vacation place in Washington, and the thunder of footfalls as I ran to catch it mid-ring. And my parents laughing at me but happy.
There was a late afternoon on the impressively white sofa in my parents’ living room in Washington. November. Almost Thanksgiving. My brother and I too old to feel like kids anymore, until our parents told us that our Dad had been diagnosed with cancer. The worst word. I think I told Steven on the phone later. I’m sure I was a wreck. He’d only known me for two months, and I wouldn’t have blamed him for fading quietly out of the picture. He stuck around. He more than stuck around.
There was a blanket spread out on the beach, cool weather but not cold, and his faith and tenderness as he talked about his sixteen-year-old baby sister, cancer survivor and one of the cheeriest, best-intentioned people on the planet.
There was the way his hands felt when he held my face in them, that golden, bright-light fizzing forever feeling I got when he looked at me like I was something beautiful and awe-inspiring, something maybe he thought didn’t, couldn’t exist. At least, that was how I felt about him.
There were lots, lots of big moments. Lots of things to remember. Lots of stumbles and redirections and tears and starry nights and kisses and emails and hurt and laughter and victories.
But there were also the little moments, the ones when you’re falling in love slowly, specifically, but also without really realizing it. Like when I was sitting on the floor at the edge of the horrible galley kitchen in the apartment he shared with a rather odd assortment of mismatched roommates. There was this sort of nondescript carpet and I’d settled myself down there to watch him cook something for dinner (maybe Hamburger Helper), and we were just talking. He was wearing these gray pajama pants that were pretty much made of the softest material in the world and then washed even softer, and I was just looking at him, liking him, when this thought just sort of crept in. That I’d like to watch him cook like this–comfortable, easy, happy–in our kitchen.
Even though we didn’t have a kitchen. Because we barely had an us by normal college student standards. But still. I thought it.
So all this was really just to say that yesterday, I saw that. Eight and a half years later, I saw it and remembered. He was standing in the kitchen–standing in our kitchen–making dinnertime pancakes while the kids did who knows what and I sat on the couch feeding Juliette and quietly watching this amazing, wonderful man who still makes me feel just as treasured as that girl on the beach when he stops and looks into my face. Who still lights me up from the inside out, with that golden bright-light forever feeling.
Sometimes I still sit on the carpet at the edge of the kitchen, just past the end of the linoleum, while he cooks a post-shift meal late, late, too late at night.
It is better than I ever could have imagined it being.
