First comes the uncertainty of knowing whether or not to move forward. Then the euphoria hits, the type that comes revved with a sense of progression once you've decide to take the plunge. Then comes my favorite part: the rock bottom of the decision. You know what I mean, the part where you're staring blankly at an almost-empty 2 bedroom apartment, surrounded by a few boxes and an old wooden rocking chair left by the previous tenants (along with some sticky walls and more than a few dust bunnies), praying the phone doesn't ring, and muttering to yourself, "what were we thinking? Really. What were we thinking?"
It's times like those that bring me back to writing publicly. It's feelings like that which have to find a published voice, even if only to a handful or two of readers.
Neither of us could get the stove to light, so we ordered in sandwiches, Jimmy Johns. You even said "that was fast" when they rang the doorbell, just like in the commercials. But the whole time I felt like we were playing a really bad game of "house". Like, the kind where, were I a child and at liberty to say such things, I would say,
"No, no, no. Forget all of that. I don't like that. Let's pretend that we're already married, and we live in a studio apartment in Seattle, and we both have artsy, work-from-home jobs that let us be together a lot, but we're also both working on graduate work so that we can both be professors. Whose idea was it that we live in a too-big-for-us/million-year-old/half-corroding apartment right next to a mortuary at which we're employed? That was the worst 'house' set-up ever. Oh, and the part where we don't get married for two more months? Yeah, that's GOT to go."
Of course, changing the set-up isn't quite so easy as all that. So, I find solace in someone's else's experiences (fictional though they may be) and repeat to myself some wise words from David Levithan's Lover's Dictionary: "It will be different once we paint. It will be different once we put things on the walls."
Then the phone rings. It's the hospital. Someone's died and you have to go.
Is this really going to be our lives for the next two years?
"It will be different once we paint. It will be different once we put things on the walls."
