I have to apologize for two things. One, I'm not posting this on Friday. I'm actually posting it on Saturday afternoon. But I am not one to be a legalist, by any means. And in my defense, I did have this written on Thursday night actually, but what can I say, it's been an exhausting week for so many reasons, not the least of which being I am working twice as much as I was last semester and it eats up a lot of my evenings. So I'm getting this to you, belatedly, and I'm sorry about it but not really that sorry. The second thing I'm (half-heartedly, because if I really cared I would fix it) apologizing for is that this is not my best quality. I like the idea but I know it could use a lot of editing and cutting down. But I never promised that Fiction Fridays would be super high-quality final draft kind of work. So here it is, as it is. Sorry sorry and enjoy:
In Love with In Love
I don’t remember when we met: people have told me we were five, naked in somebody’s backyard sandbox at a Sunday School barbecue. I wonder if, even as little kids, you had already started looking at me the way you do now, that way that makes me feel like I might do something scandalous: get up in the middle of Sunday morning service and do cartwheels between the pews, and you would laugh and it would make you love me all the more. You find me whimsical, enchanting, and it isn’t egotistical of me to say this, it’s just that I can tell, from the look that you have in your green-gray-blue eyes. I know that I scare you sometimes, but I think you love me all the more for that.
Then, when we were twelve, around twelve anyway, your parents invited mine down to your Saquish beach house to eat hamburgers and play pickle on the sea grass. Us kids rode tumbled together in your daddy’s truck bed, tucked under a blanket so the police wouldn’t see and get mad. We were comrades then, hiding together from any who might seek to separate us. But then, on the beach, in our adolescent swimsuits, you and your brother threw clumps of seaweed at my sister and me, and I tried to throw some back, but my throw wasn’t very strong and they always fell short of where you stood, so cocky and confident, and you laughed.
When we got older you apologized, real shame-faced and reticent, as if I was really going to hold you responsible for teasing me when we were twelve. I smiled and said it was fine and I saw relief slump into your narrow shoulders and your eyes follow the way my teeth bit at my bottom lip, nervous and flirtatious all at once.
You told me I was demure once, and I gave you a hard time about it, and you shrunk back into your shell immediately, trying to modify the statement, admitting you supposed you couldn’t really say, you didn’t propose to know me that intimately, after all.
After church you’d linger with me in the foyer, the smell of coffee and musty choir robes, dusty Bibles comfortably wrapped around us, pushing us together and sometimes the chatter of the mingling congregation would get so loud, you’d have to lean in real close to hear me and I could see the blonde stubble on your chin.
When we went away to school, you brought those conversations with you: you’d email me and I’d send replies, long and detailed and complicated, because I never could manage to make my writing very succinct.
I don’t know what you ever saw in me. You were always so good, always so content and quiet and thoughtful and happy to do your Bible reading and happy to wear ironed, laundered button ups to church, and happy to clean you room, and happy to wake up earlier than seven o’clock in the morning. I was the girl that got the tattoos and had a Mohawk that one year in high school and wore ostentatious clothing and unabashedly questioned things we really shouldn’t question. I was wild, flyaway, self-conscious, annoying, fickle. I was the color red: sometimes dark and intense and moody, other times bright and cheerful and lovely.
I don’t know, now, if I’m really in love with you. We were engaged last summer under the poplar tree with the swing in your cousin’s backyard and part of me wasn’t surprised, part of me felt like this was expected, maybe almost like I had done it before, like it was a dream and I was only living it out again, in real life. And part of me couldn’t help but wonder, though it felt natural, did it feel right?
You hold my hand now- that’s the farthest you’ll go with me physically- almost nervously you inch your long, cold fingers toward mine and I feel almost repulsed at times, at times it takes everything I have in me not to slap that cold, tentative hand away. But then I remember the way you were when we were kids on the beach, brutally teasing and rough and unapologetic, and it gives me hope, that the twelve-year-old seaweed thrower might still be there somewhere inside, that he might show his face again one day, that someday, if I stick by you, I will coax him out again.
I lie awake at night sometimes and wonder if I am actually in love with you or really just in love with the way that you are in love with me.
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