Notes on Love Days Before Marriage

Notes on Love Days Before Marriage

I met Jeff three years ago at the bar where he likes to work and where I liked to
drink. I was new to my hometown having returned only to find the city I grew up in changed beyond my recognition. I’d left the beginning of a promising career in advertising in Dallas and found myself working in a fried food trailer across the street from the bar where Jeff works. That summer depression smelled like funnel cake and shots of whiskey.

I’d cut my hair the way women cut their hair when they’re courting change. Still, nearly a year had passed and my hair refused to grow. With a shaggy, over-grown pixie cut, box dyed the reddish color most favored by Eastern European women of a certain age, with the sleeves cut off my threadbare t-shirts, the underarms permanently stained with sweat, with my GI tract suffering through free hot sandwiches, pizza and French fries, I’d never felt so insignificant.

I let anyone within ear shot know that I felt that I didn’t belong there so obsessed was I with my own misery that I failed to realize how insulting I sounded to the people whose lives depended on working in those trailers. As if mine didn’t too.

I was almost always out of change because my trailer’s owner was almost always out of money. One night, greasy and aproned, feeling crusty in my battered tank top, my hair slicked back, I dragged my feet in a pair of dirty, blown-out ballet flats as I crossed the street to ask the bar for change.

The bar was crowded and buzzing with an energy I envied.

Jeff approached me at the side of the bar, where he smiled and asked, “What can I get you, darlin’?”

Propelled by duty, even the smallest task can give you a sense of purpose if only fleeting, I summoned the courage to ask him for forty one dollar bills and handed over two crumpled twenties.

I watched him as he counted the bills. His thin and athletic frame, his smooth head, his large nose. He looked like a Roman statue. He handed me the change and smiled.

He doesn’t remember it, but I do because he took my breath away.

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We all have friends that are fond of saying things like:

“No, I’m not dating anyone and I really don’t want to. Ever.”

“Marriage isn’t for people like me and yes, I’m fine with that.”

“I don’t NEED anyone and I never WANT to need anyone.”

And on days when we’re feeling human enough, we can admit we’ve all been this person. These remarks aren’t about ourselves. They’re about the love we don’t think we deserve because someone at some time let us know we were foolish to want it. Made us in some way embarrassed for wanting to share a life. Made us fear that we’re not good enough, do not deserve it, that we’re better off to never have had than to have ever lost it all.

I’m not saying everyone needs to pair off to be happy. I’m saying it’s okay to want love, to want a partner, and to even feel free to admit it.

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I would not be marrying Jeff if it weren’t for two people: my friend Dana and my brother Evan.

 I think of Dana the way I think about Texas: big, brash and unyielding. Hearty and opinionated, at times brusque in a way that lets you know she’s been hurt, but also open to apologize in a way that lets you know she still believes in love. Dana is impossible to ignore and full of the kind of hope most dare not fight for.

I met her in the food trailer park that summer and as broke as I was, as fallen as I felt, as ashamed of my own reflection, Dana wouldn’t leave me alone. As much as I would’ve preferred to get wine drunk by my lonesome, she knew danger when she saw it. And so we went to Jeff’s bar where I drank with her and her friends, queer people who were unapologetic about who they were and who they hoped to be. She invited me into a world that gave me confidence and left me better than she found me.

However, on too many nights I quietly pined over Jeff until someone in the group urged me to ask him out, but I never did. I always went home instead. Maybe tomorrow.

And then there’s Evan, my brother and first friend. He’d returned home after a decade away. He worked in the trailer park too and that year we leaned on each other, broken by other people, sick with loneliness and trying to figure out who we were as adults. After our shifts ended, we’d lock our trailers and walk over to the bar, free from responsibilities to our jobs or ourselves. Sitting on stools we’d laugh at our own jokes told in a language only we knew.

Evan is more outwardly friendly than I am and as he got to know the bartenders, they got to know me and I got to know Jeff. If only as Evan’s sister, if only it meant having something to talk to Jeff about.

You see, I was thirsty and Dana and Evan gave me a seat at the bar.

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Our first date was Christmas day night 2013. We met at a different bar and I was surprised to see him on the other side. We started nervously with a shot and a beer and other rounds followed. We smoked cigarettes and talked in that way you talk on those kinds of nights you hoped would never end. The rapid conversation and the desire to share everything about yourself. You hardly know the person and yet you feel you’ve always known them. The kind of talk you have with someone you hope will stay forever.

We closed the bar down. We made out in the cold not more than five feet from a hobo who watched on. That night I dreamed he told me he loved me.

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On Sunday, October 23, Jeff and I will marry. What once seemed impossible is now the most right thing.

It’s been nearly three years since our first date, longer since he last listened to me recount another day behind a fryer. My hair has grown long and natural and gray, but my heart is healthier than it’s ever been. We’ve fought with each other and for each other. We’ve bettered ourselves to help better each other. We’ve been to the beaches of California, the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the rain forests of Washington state and a tour of the South, but the greatest adventure has just begun.

Because in Jeff I have found the person to whom I can surrender myself, to be vulnerable enough to reveal my truest, most secret, and at times darkest, heart.

To be alone is to be accountable to yourself and sometimes that’s not enough. As successfully independent as we all hope we can be, it’s nice to have someone rooting for you. I don’t surrender my autonomy lightly, but I happily trade it to have, without fail, Jeff’s body against mine, his hand on my backside, his sleepy “I love you,” as I drift toward another night’s sleep wrapped in a love I know I deserve.