By: Amanda Layne
It was the first night of what would become a lifelong love-bender you sent me on. We were only kids then, brought together by the allure of the night and the neon glow of lights pouring down off fluorescent signs at the only decent bar on campus. I was far too young and naïve to realize that I didn’t need to dress a certain way to catch your attention. You leaned over the counter from where you were sitting on a stool with wobbly legs, nearly as unsteady as mine became the second I saw you. Your image was partially distorted by puffs of smoke swirling off the ends of cigarettes, and swaying bodies blocking my view, but I still saw you. I’m a firm believer in the power of the stars, and the way mine aligned had me born a Sagittarius, bred from fire and a lover of freedom and an open road ahead of me, no strings attached. It wasn’t very often that I looked at someone like that.
An hour passed by and I remained glued to my seat, unable to grow a spine and go talk to you.
“It could lead to a wild love, one for the ages,” my friends said, convinced we were soulmates. “You have to give it a shot.”
Years later I would find their prediction to be eerily accurate, but at the time I cringed at the thought of you hearing what we were talking about, grateful for the noise.
“How do I even know he’d be into me?” I asked them, wishing they would stop pushing and leave me alone.
My friends were certain that you had been staring at me since we arrived, but I was so painfully shy that I stood up and set my intentions to walk out the door and never look back. Luckily, they didn’t let me sabotage the best thing that ever happened to me, yet I never thanked them for it until our wedding day.
I remember the approach feeling long and drawn-out, as if we were moving in slow motion. It was a Friday night, so the space between our table and where you were sitting was as crowded as the rest of the bar. Music blasted, countless voices rang in my ears, and I nearly threw up thanks to a lethal combination of alcohol and nerves. When we finally made it, my friends set me down in the seat directly to your left. Before I knew it they were back at our table, the safe spot where I could perch and observe you from a distance, a place almost as appealing as where I was right then. Still, in that moment, I would have given anything to have been back in my comfort zone.
The words came slowly.
“Hi,” you said with a smile, shifting your body on that rickety old stool to face me.
“Hi,” I replied with a racing heart, unable to meet your gaze.
Then you set down your drink to shake my hand and I felt your skin on mine for the first time. Your touch was what I’d imagine a cloud to feel like. Not one filled with thunder and lightning, a looming darkness, but the kind with curved-edges and white fluffy insides. Delicate, light, soft; a companion to the sun. The type of cloud that a child might draw above a picture of their home, because they know it’s safe and won’t cause a storm.
I remember the way you looked in this moment so vividly. Your dark brown hair with an inkling of a curl sat tousled and messy on your head. Your skin was tan and smooth, glistening from a thin layer of sweat, and your eyes were sparkling in a bright blue-green hue, like two swirling oceans. I knew the second I looked into them that my life would never be the same.
I felt like I could talk to you forever, and that hasn’t changed. We discussed music tastes, ideal travel destinations, and dream jobs. We argued over which movies were the classics, and which TV shows were the funniest. We even talked about the deep stuff, the loss of loved ones and feeling hopeless, confused, and without purpose. It was at this point that I let it slip that I write. You tried relentlessly for me to recite something that I’d written, but I kept shooting you down. After a while you gave up, but I wish you hadn’t. A part of me wanted to let you in on that locked-away, heavily guarded portion of myself, to open-up my rusty, pad-locked heart to you. Then again, those things take time, and you never told me your secrets either. Not yet, at least.
I was way in over my head at this point, but I guess that’s how it feels when you’re falling for someone. You keep sinking down deeper under the waves, water filling the space above you and the surface stretching father and farther out of reach, but you never come up for air. It feels so dangerous, but somehow you know you’ll be okay. This other person becomes what you need to survive, even more than oxygen. They are your lifeline, the reason you are alive. They become your heart; you can feel them in the blood that pumps through your veins, but they do not control the pace of your lungs. That is left up to you. Love is being stronger together but supporting who each other are at the same time. Over the years this concept was tested many times in our relationship, as was the strength of the bond we share, but my love for you never faltered. It is as strong as it was more than sixty years ago when we met – even stronger – and it always will be.
Now, I’m looking over at you with a much heavier heart in a very different setting than where we first met. Instead of sitting on a barstool, you’re laying in a hospital bed. The loud music and commotion are replaced by the beeping of IV machines and the unsteady quiver that is your breath. The dancing strangers have become nurses and doctors moving much less freely from room to room, and instead of my friends I am surrounded by family members and loved ones who came to say goodbye.
I knew way back then that I had been dealt The Lovers in an invisible deck. One that has been shuffled a thousand times and thrown into the wind, where I was expected to reach out and catch my fate, to hold it in one hand by hanging onto you. Still, despite all this, I yearned to know one more thing that not even a tarot card could answer, the thing that I’d been dying to know since that night had begun. A pleasantry we had somehow managed to skip over during introductions.
It was something you had printed on the top of every school paper, signed onto your driver’s license and the birth certificates of our children, and written onto my heart so that I would always be yours. Now, it was on the paper bracelet around your wrist, and it will soon be used on your headstone, inscribed directly above “Loving husband and father”.
As I sit at your bedside and hold your hand in mine, I’m realizing I wanted to know your name so that one day, like today, when we had taken many more trips around the sun together and had grown older and wiser with time, after I had given every piece of myself to you, I could finally put pen to paper and give a title to our love story.