You are eighteen.
You go on a blind date. He is a guy who has a summer job working in the paper mills. He has a mustache. You have your hair done in a sticky cotton-candy configuration called Julia Roberts Ala Pretty Woman. You are both awkward and don’t know what to say to each other because it is weird. It is weird. You keep repeating it to each other. You start telling each other lies to impress each other, growing bigger and bigger and bigger. He never smokes. Well, maybe a little bit. You smoke like a chimney. Except that you don’t. How weird. Weird. And in your head, you think ‘what a weirdo.’
He touches your face, fingers grazing over cheeks lightly. And you think a little of you breaks away right then. He drives to Lake Michigan and you stand at the water’s edge, listening to the waves lap against the shore and just at that moment, over his shoulder, in what was probably a warm-up act for the Pleiades, you watch a liquid drop of starlight off its hook and into the black.
‘Make a wish’ he reminds you, as though to not wish were unheard of.
He’s so weird. You’re not sure you even like him, even though he touched your face that way, all soft and delicate like you were made of porcelain. You decide to be optimistic and in your head say to the stars ‘I hope this date doesn’t turn out to be a mistake’ and decide that if he asks what you wished for, like some corny John Hughes movie or something, that you’re going to say that you wished for a red Porsche or a cream colored Mercedes with a buff interior, but instead, in a reverberation like the tremor of a silenced church bell, you get the answer of certainty that it will work out, that you will marry him, that this is fate and you have no choice. You sigh. Oh great, you think, mustache weirdo. Just great.
And then he kisses you. And you realize that you never really had a choice.
You are twenty.
He asks you to marry him.
You say yes, maybe, maybe yes, maybe but not right now, but maybe. Then the two of you are giddy and go to the truck stop and the waitress is the only person you ever tell. You sit in the booth that has become ‘your’ booth, the one in the farthest back corner, away from the counter and the Vitality Juice machine and the scary brillo-headed cooks who smoke as they flip burgers, wielding spatulas like samurais. You both declare that to the waitress that you should get a free piece of pie for having just proposed. The waitress laughs and doesn’t give you free pie, but you just don’t care.
You never tell anyone else.
You are twenty-four.
You’ve lived together for three years. You are both working fulltime jobs. He lets you drive the good car, so then you buy him a car. You don’t talk to each other. He is insufferable. You are even more insufferable. You spend most of your hours in the bedroom watching a tiny 13-inch television while he sits in the living room playing Doom. You start to envision yourself as one of the characters in Big Head Todd’s ‘Bittersweet’. You feel as though no one could possibly understand you because certainly he does not.
You have emotionally overwrought marathon fights followed by insane makeup sex.
He asks you to marry him again. You tell him no and that you won’t say yes until he has a ring or a date in mind, because you have a feeling that if you say yes without either one, you’ll be responsible for getting both of them and that bugs you.
Then slowly, bit by bit, the fights just drops away. You both realize that you’re each scarred from words and threats and unspoken desperate thoughts. You both realize that you were young, stupid and youngandstupid. He tells you that he can never imagine being on the earth without you. You realize that he is under your skin. He urges you to go back to school and works two jobs while you drop down to 25 hours a week and pick up 18 credits a semester. You have your own language. You finish each other’s sentences. You know what he’s thinking but don’t even know how you know it. One night, you both take a self-scoring IQ test. He grades your test and says that you scored 150. You grade his test and find that he scored 142, and when you tell him that he’s 150 too, you realize that you’ve never loved anyone this much in your entire life.
Then one cold November night, he asks you to marry him a third time but this time pushes a beautiful flashy solitaire, one he designed around the gold of both his parent’s wedding bands, onto your index finger.
And this time you say yes.
You are twenty-five.
You are two semesters shy of graduation. His parents encourage you to buy a house while interest rates are down, so you do because it sounds like a good idea, but then just as you are signing the papers, you realize that it will be at least a year before you have a wedding. You gripe. You are irritated, because he has medical insurance and you do not. He hems and haws about expensive weddings. Then you have the opportunity to spend the summer after graduation in England. Without him. And without even thinking twice, he tells you to do it. And so you sit in a darkened recording studio, speaking into a caricature of a microphone, taping a personal message to be played over the loudspeaker at your college graduation, you thank him for believing in you and being your hero and your voice cracks when you say the words ‘best friend’. And the day after he hears this recording, you get on a plane to England, fully expecting to crash into the Atlantic, but you don’t and it is wonderful, the best thing ever, but at every ruin, at every Old Historical Place, you keep thinking how much he would love it there.
You are twenty-six.
His parents inform you over dinner that he must make up his mind about a wedding, otherwise they are going to Hawaii the following year and they need to know in advance so he says ‘fine, let’s do it’. And then you choose flowers and cakes and venues and attendants and a church and music to walk down the aisle. And even though he balks at the prices of everything, when you confide in him that you can’t decide between two dresses, one perfectly fine reasonable dress or another one by a designer that costs twice as much, he tells you to buy the expensive one because otherwise you’ll be wondering what you missed out on and feel less confident. And you realize with that answer that he knows you better than you do yourself.
You are twenty-seven.
It is your wedding day. You almost oversleep because of the muscle relaxants you took the night before, so you run around franticly trying to get everything together. Then, somewhere between the driveway and the bathroom, you lose the keys to your rental car. You freak out. You call him and tell him what happened and try not to cry. While you’re getting your hair and makeup done at the stylist, he and the best man tear apart the house, but never find the keys. He calls and apologizes and tells you that things will go wrong and the day will still be perfect because you’re both going to be together forever.
Later, an hour before the ceremony, he waits for you in an empty church while outside your families and friends scurry around in their nice clothes, their voices floating in through the open windows. Then you walk down the aisle and meet him in the front of the church and your throats get tight and your eyes fill with tears and you can’t speak to each other so instead you nod and smile tight smiles as you try to keep from crying because in this moment, you know in a reverberation like the tremor of a silenced church bell, that this person is exactly the person you’ve always wanted to see standing there. Waiting for you.
Happy Valentines Day Bucky.
