They were the perfect couple that didn’t believe in marriage. She’d watched her parent’s fall apart, and his were too concerned with status to fall apart. So instead, they were happily together, but never bound by law. He made her believe in love again, and she kept him from a self-destructive state. They were the exact brand of medicine each other needed. And really, that’s what love is. Love is being able to fix someone who believed they were broken, and being willing to be fixed yourself.
They met at a coffee shop in Brooklyn. She’d ordered a cup of black coffee, after making sure that the cups weren’t made of Styrofoam. He’d ordered a green tea. They were forced to sit together at the counter, because it was eight in the morning and the place was packed with single mothers and fathers in a hurry to get to work, and college students who were savoring the last few moments of a weekend. She had thought ahead and not signed up for any classes that met before noon on a Monday; the only reason she was up so early was because she hadn’t gone to bed. He wasn’t so lucky, and had to be at school in an hour. They sat together for a while, neither casting even a glance in the other’s direction. He was building a castle out of sugar packets; she was reading a paperback Russian novel. Sipping her coffee, she decided it needed more sugar, and, never taking her eyes from the pages, she reached towards where the sugar should be. Her fingers found an empty container, which forced her to look up. When she did, she saw that the black-haired boy beside her had taken every single packet of sugar within arms reach to construct a castle of sugar. “Excuse me,” she said, mustering all the politeness an insomniac could in the morning. “You’ve got all the sugar.”
He looked up, startled out of his concentration. “Huh?”
She sighed. “You’re bogarting all of the sugars. Can you give me a couple?”
“Oh. Sorry.” He carefully extracted two from the top of his creation, making sure not to knock the rest of it down.
Instead of returning to her book, she began studying him, and his castle. “That’s pretty intricate.”
“Hm? Oh, I guess.” He shrugged, and they shared a glance. “I’m into buildings.”
She nodded, and subtly rested her book down. “Is that your major? Architecture?”
“Yeah,” he replied, turning towards her on his stool. “You?”
“Creative writing.”
They talked until he was running the risk of being reprimanded for tardiness, and before he left, they exchanged phone numbers and email addresses, each scrawled on a packet of sugar. He’d forgotten his cell phone at home, and she didn’t believe in them.
Their initial meeting was over a year and a half ago, and since then, their relationship had evolved into something neither could’ve anticipated. Throughout the eighteen months they’d been together, he’d changed his major from architecture to child psychology, and she had started a novel. He’d forgotten about Valentine’s Day, and she’d had to miss his birthday for a funeral. They’d debated anything and everything over slices of pizza and wine, and told each other secrets they’d thought they would always keep to themselves. And now, on their two-year anniversary, they were getting tattoos. Their friends couldn’t understand it; why tattoos? Why not rings? But the two of them didn’t care. Tattoos were much more permanent than rings, and despite their trepidations about marriage, they wanted something that they knew would link them forever. She’d suggested a heart, but he was skeptical. It was emasculating, but in the end, she won. There was nothing else that seemed to fit.
So on the exact date that they’d met two years ago, they blew off all of their classes and went into Manhattan, where they’d had an appointment with a tattoo artist for a month now. The end result was more than they could’ve expected. It was just a small heart on each of their left hips, but the intricacy wasn’t what mattered. What mattered is that they each had a full heart now, never to be broken or removed.
No comments:
Post a Comment