Five Years

The moments before everything changed for good

Five years ago today, I woke up to, arguably, the most important day of my entire existence. A Friday in the middle of October, a morning full of classes I found exhausting, excluding my creative writing course around the conference table at the end of the Bugtruck, or the English department for those not familiar with my small, private college lore. I’m sure I was running late, parking illegally, listening to Harry Styles’ new album, and nervous, oh so nervous, because that night, at seven o’clock, my husband would knock on my door for the very first time, and my life would never be the same.

I can get so caught in those kind of moments, trying my hardest to remember tiny details of the before, what I was thinking, what I might have said. So many times in my life I’ve felt the urgent need to find a certain journal entry, so hopeful for insight on my very own mind, just a study into my memories, quite frequently necessary for an over-thinker such as me. My memories of that Friday feels like a swelling moment, one that took twenty-one years to finally come to fruition.

I remember taking a nap after class, thinking how odd it was for him to schedule such a late time, but preparing myself to be fully alert the entire time. For my entire life, my getting ready routine has taken, at most, an hour, but I started curling my hair hours and hours before I knew he would come. In that apartment, I would primp myself while perched on a fuzzy white bench beneath a glass hallway table, watching our television through the mirror resting against the wall. I’d watch Dancing with the Stars and cry at every episode, Brothers and Sisters, Peter’s season of the Bachelor. I got dressed in a polka dot blouse and boot cut jeans, loafers and a green coat, and then I sat on the couch and waited, talking to my roommate, nearly in shivers of nerves. That night, our apartment felt like a rotating door of random people, that in hindsight, had no business being a part of my meeting Price.

The January before I met him, I was broken up with by my long distance boyfriend. We had met one Saturday morning over Christmas break, halfway. We had lunch at a café, me swirling my French fries in ketchup until I felt physically ill, aware of what was bound to happen. We broke up by the lake in a town I’d never been to before that day, and as he said his side, I watched two ducks on the water, together and then not. One flew away, and I so distinctly remember thinking that this was so very corny and yet fitting, watching one duck find the strength to leave by choice.

When he finished, I told him I wanted to stay by the lake, that I’d call the one friend I knew who lived there, praying she’d pick up and come get me, just so I didn’t have to sit in his passenger seat, driving back to my car. How just pitiful that would have been, embarrassing. I sat on the curb, the January wind of the lake water whipping my hair across my face, wet with tears, thinking how I didn’t care how young I was, I just didn’t want to do this again. Navigate learning someone, not knowing if it’d be worth it in the end. Learn someone’s family, learn their homes, how they talk, their stories, how to act around their parents, wondering if they even like you. Quite honestly, the entire thing is exhausting, and at the ripe young start of my twenties, I had naively given up.

But then October 18, 2019 arrived. And somehow, while I was so incredibly nervous to meet him, I wasn’t nervous about the rest.

He knocked seven times on the door to my apartment, and I remember saying goodbye to my roommate, letting him lead me to his Volkswagen, commenting on how much I liked it, and then the two minute drive to the coffee shop that serves dinner, too. I broke the silence with my shaky voice: “Price, I need you to know I am so nervous.” And by speaking it into existence, it’s like it was gone. Replaced with a sense of urgency, to tell him everything I know. We sat for three hours in that booth. He’ll say I filled the majority of it, telling stories of my friends, classes, summertime. But I can close my eyes and feel the tiny details he shared that night, about his trip to Belgium to golf, about his time in college, about his family’s French bull dog. Then pulling back into my parking lot in the pitch black, him walking me to my door, the smell of him as I hugged him goodbye, his green canvas jacket and plaid button-down and glasses and air force ones. He texted me an hour later that he was home, some anecdote from our conversation, and an old school smiley face as I laid in my bed, in my pajamas and disbelief.

I think about that night with the same regret as the night my water broke, regret in that I wish I had documented every single tiny detail in preparation of remembering. I wish I had a picture of me standing in our kitchen, dressed up for my date with my new perfume and my favorite lipstick. Just as I wish I had a picture of me standing on our front porch at three in the morning, my hair wet from the fastest shower of my life, my swollen belly hidden beneath my gray Old Navy hoodie, my little girl right there with me, even then. Those moments feel the same…the version of me right before a new one replaced it: Price’s and now Kit’s.

I always feel full of butterflies to think back on our date, how we knew so little of one another, and now, there is a life made of the two of us, asleep in our bedroom. Now, we’ve morphed into each other, things we say, little silly skits that are picked up here and there, never ending. We find the same things pretty, want the same Saturday mornings, exist in each other’s routines. We share brothers and sisters and I call his Mimi mine.

His sisters both got married last year at their childhood home, Savannah in March and Sarah Grace’s in October. Sarah was married two days after we lost my uncle in a tragic accident. Price and I drove down the morning before the wedding in silence, my mind filled with heartache and regret and memories of him as I stared out the window, my eyes swollen, my head in disbelief. The threat of steaming rainstorms took their chance for a wedding on the back porch, so Sarah Grace and her husband Wes were married in the living room, her siblings, me, and her cousins lined up beside her and the grand piano Price plays every time we go home. The whole time, I thought how tender, how precious life is, how beautiful to join families, for families to grow, to be loved by so many, prayed over by so many just because of two people falling in love. How thoughtful and kind the Lord was to me to give me another branch of family through Price.

My mom has said a few times to me how unsettling it has been to her to realize she has spent more of her life with my dad than she did in her parents’ home. And given I’m only 26, five years feels so, so very vast. Twenty percent of my time…I really cannot believe I’ve known him for this long.

We’re celebrating his thirtieth birthday this weekend. I have gifts hidden throughout the house, grocery lists for a big supper and peanut butter pie, a tablecloth and French blue napkins in need of ironing. I feel so honored that I get to throw him a birthday party, all because of that Friday night, five years ago. I feel so urgent in my prayers for more and more time, for more and more of my life percentage to be spent with him.

I tiptoed past Kit to find my college journal, filed into my bedside stack of stories, and while I didn’t write anything on this day five years ago, I wrote two days later:

I went on a date this weekend with a guy named Price…I just felt very content after he dropped me off. I didn’t want to stop talking to him, and I wasn’t even nervous by the end! I feel very warm about him.

And I still do.