It’s Wednesday morning, November 15th. The last day that I am 40 years old. A week ago today my first book, a novel called Loved based on my early adulthood, turned 11 years old. Each year that passes I find myself less like the protagonist in the book who was based on me, and less like the writer who wrote it in my late twenties, and the more harshly I look back on it. My only copy is in my basement now, I think, and not on the shelf in the living room.
That’s probably not fair, I guess.
I’m sitting at one of my favorite coffee shops in Portland. It’s raining outside and it’s warm and full of chitchat in here; the former is not surprising and the later is for a weekday morning. I came here to write while Colt sleeps in and Isla is in school. I came here to write about Colt.
Earlier this week I asked myself, what is it that I want to write about for the story that comes out on my birthday?
And as I pondered the options I kept coming back to the same thing: I want to tell more fully and directly our love story. But how do you tell a story you’ve told thousands of times in thousands of ways? It’s not so easy, actually, even though many of the same words I’ve said over and over again.
I wrote about him in Dear Portland earlier this year. I wrote about him in my book, that first one, eleven years ago. And I’ve written about him time and time again in between those pieces and since. There was a story about words that begin with A, and the time we met up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a dreamy few days and an exploration on the magic that water holds. To always having water, he wrote to me. The story about how I stopped sleeping on airplanes during one of our times apart because I hated waking up there without him. (I still don’t sleep well on airplanes. My love for him has ruined that for me.) And another one about the end of our time, the first time, in Portland, about how we share our pain with those we love. How we can’t help it.
But none of those are the whole story.
Where to begin?
I open the final edit of Loved from somewhere deep in my laptop’s files.
I haven’t read these words in a long, long time.
I scroll to somewhere late in the book and then there he is on the page. Before I’d even met him: “I loved his curly brown hair, his bright smile, his jeans rolled up at the ankles.”
And when we first met: “Unfortunately, he still hadnʼt asked for my number, or a date, or my hand in marriage, and my drink was getting low.”
Marriage.
It’s a cute line, but there’s depth to this. There was then, and there is even more so now.
We’ve been talking about marriage since we reconnected in March of this year. At first I said I wouldn’t get married again and then I pretty quickly recanted that statement. Under the right conditions, I would. To him? Of course I would.
I thought it would be him fifteen years ago when we met and it took us a while to get here, to where we are. To this version of our relationship. Honestly? Right now? I’ve never felt so loved. I’ve never felt so at ease with another person. My nervous system loves him, even, which is a truly beautiful thing.
“He’s the first boyfriend I’ve actually chosen for myself” I said recently to a friend. “Everyone else I’d dated, even my ex-husband, had to convince me, or some people were suggested to me by mutual friends, but I chose Colt so purely and completely for myself.”
I did then and I have now.
And he chooses me too.
I’m still not telling the whole story, am I?
Okay. Here you go.
We met - shoot, I was just going to write “in May or June” but my book says it was August - we met in August of 2008. (Oh my god I’ve been telling the story wrong for years.) He was 24 and I was 25. I’d watched him all summer behind the bar at one of my favorite restaurants. He made my blackberry mojitos and I drooled over the way he moved behind the bar. It was like he was carbonated. All bounce and brightness.