And Then There’s This
You have an orthodontist smile.
That’s the first thing I noticed about you. Your teeth are balanced, white rectangles sitting in a flawless arc and almost no one has that luck; that’s pocketbook beauty. At some point you had braces and while you pondered your order I wondered if you were self-conscious back then. Did the other kids call you ‘metal mouth’?
You were confident when you walked in but the minimalist menu, populated by unfamiliar names like cortado and pour over, threw you. When I asked if you had any questions you smiled, a hint of unwilling embarrassment in the way you looked at me from under your eyelashes and asked, “What do you recommend?”
Our eyes met, green on green and I tried not to smirk. “Well, what do you like?”
I asked you a few questions and you opened up and by the time I passed you a cappuccino over the bar I knew that you were new to Dallas, that you’d never been to a coffee shop other than Starbucks (in truth, I knew that before you said a word), that you preferred scotch to bourbon, and that you worked from home as a mobile app developer. Before you left, you asked for my number and I knew what came next too:
The first place we went together was a lecture about Central American art history at the Dallas Museum of Art. We both had already reserved a ticket separately, but we sat together and had cocktails together and flirted together. There was that confidence again: You walked me home and kissed me goodnight and sauntered away, self-assured but not quite cocky. I watched you leave and the next night I chewed my bottom lip as I called to find out if I could interest you in another night out. You said yes.
Our romance was a whirlwind: Late nights of whiskey and laughter, conversation as sparkling as the accompanying wine. We were engaged within the year, married the next. We traveled together and worked separately and loved each other. A few years later we had our first child, quickly followed by another. They grew up and we grew old and we were happy more often than we weren’t. That’s the best you can hope for, really.
But then you got sick and I found God and we held on desperately to those moments back when you didn’t know what a cortado was and I was still figuring out what loving someone meant. You started spending more nights at the hospital than at home and relied on your nurse more than me, and I still loved you so desperately that I emptied our savings account and mortgaged our house just to keep your heart beating and your face smiling one second longer. Our kids took over their college loans and still you never got better and one day we buried you and I never, ever let go of the memory of your shy smile. That’s how our story ended but never really finished.
Every word after “What do you recommend?” isn’t true. It happened in my mind but not in real life and it almost certainly won’t.
There’s loving The One, loving the one you’re with, and then there’s this: Falling for the idea of someone, for the fleeting imaginary life you could have together. Like that initial moment of attraction but a thousand times more intense and infinitely more dizzying. This is meeting someone’s eyes for just a second but in that second living an entire other life, one where a complete stranger could be everything you wanted and all the things you didn’t know you needed. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does…
It’s not as good as the real thing. Falling in love with a stranger, even just for a minute, is breathtaking. But reality encroaches: they walk away and life moves on and only the impression of their shy smile as they asked what a cortado is remains. The rest is as ephemeral and empty as the bubbles in the champagne I imagined us sharing.
Your name starts with a C (I think). Just so you know, our kids would have been beautiful and smart.
