On Buying a Vacuum Cleaner Together

On buying a vacuum cleaner together

You see her in the library, scrawling furiously with her pencil in the margins of a book. You smile at her, and she smiles back at you so you venture a hello at the checkout counter and she says hello back. You walk her to the T stop and she seems nice so you ask her if she wants to talk more over a beer or a coffee or something. She replies beer, which surprises you. Years later she tells you she said yes only because you included coffee in the request.

You find that you can both laugh at the same things, even at the absurdities and subtleties, at the nuance of things, so you agree to meet at Downtown Crossing one day to walk around, and you find that you can both be like five year olds together, just walking and talking and exploring. You can walk with a stick in your hand, or pick up a rock and throw it at a tree and she doesn't laugh or criticize you for it. Instead, she eggs you on. You start to see her for who she is. She is the girl who can climb a tree with a book in her hand and see the world from afar, and up close at the same time. The girl with a pencil always in her hand, or in her mouth, always reading, always taking notes in the margins. The one who can see things that everyone else has seen, but then point out shadows and light that everyone else has missed.

You begin to meet regularly because its more fun than anything else you can think of to do. Then comes the sharing of small expenses. Endless coffees and movies, and daily adventures. And then its not really so much being with her all the time that is important, but more being able to talk to her about anything and everything and seeing what she thinks.

Then you are together all the time, and your stuff is at your place, but also at her place too. Her apartment mates are used to waking up in the morning and finding the two of you in the kitchen having a coffee. Your names become synonymous with each other to your friends. You both become part of each other's furniture. Your lives become more and more tangled up together, like two strings left alone in a drawer. Entanglement is the natural way for certain things. Strings. People.

Then you move in together and buy a vacuum cleaner, then a couch, then all the rest, and then you both go into fast forward trying to hold onto it all together, but your lives flash by in what seems a matter of weeks. The houses, the cars, the kids, the dogs, cats, chickens and goats. The years. OMG the years. Like water through your hands. Then one day a storm shows up on the horizon, and it feels like only a couple of months after you first met. The kids are grown, and you are getting ready to spend more time together again, but she tells you she needs to be on her own from here on in, to take shelter from the storm.

Then its 33 years later and you are sitting in a coffee shop 500 miles away, writing this exact sentence and wishing you could talk to her again, the girl in the tree with a book in her hand, and wondering what she is thinking about right now.