Tonight I took a comfortable position on Stephen's couch, cracked open 642 Things and took on the first prompt: What can happen in a second? I got started by making a list of things that answered the question. It wasn't long before Stephen was looking over my shoulder with curiosity.
He has a fascination with me writing. I captured his attention right away with my sentence structure in my emails to him when we were getting to know each other.
"Regret, quench..." he read out loud from my list. He doesn't know yet how private and self conscious I am about my writing.
"When it's good I'll share it with you," I told him, and sealed the promise with a kiss.
I went back to my list after a self-imposed five minute time limit and picked a few of the things to explore further. I was working on Stephen's laptop, not my first choice of medium. I'm still a pen and paper kind of girl first, my own keyboard second. The words and situations I associated with Quench start flowing from my head to my fingers, occasionally halted by a typo that I blame on the unfamiliar keyboard set up. It feels good and I am relieved that my brain still remembers how to compose.
"How's the writing going, baby?" Stephen asked while I was in the middle of describing the body's reaction to having a basic need fulfilled.
I lifted my hands from the keyboard and smiled at the interuption. "This is why I would need a writing nook," I told him. We had spent the afternoon being very couple-y by touring show homes and then coming back to his house where a crockpot of roast and fall root vegetables was waiting for us. It was a day dream of a Sunday for me, letting myself peer into a possible future, imagining what it could feel like to have a home to prepare a Sunday dinner in with a man I love dearly and who would join me on trips to Costco. Today I bought a crate of nectarines and twice as many bananas as I could possibly eat in the week. Someday spoiled fruit could be but a memory.
This is a quote from my blog post almost exactly one year ago:
So I guess all of that has made me brave enough now to just say it, once anyway. I'm still not going to make a big deal of it. In only 6 months it seems I've come a long way though. I never smiled for pictures. I kind of feel bummed that so many of my growing up moments were lost because I refused to have my picture taken or I just hate the picture that came out when I had no choice in the matter. I always felt like I was a smiley person on the inside but couldn't reflect that outwards. Tonight I told myself I would take a picture of myself smiling a real smile. Then I came home and changed into my pjs and totally forgot that I was going to do that. But before I washed my face and put on my glasses I grabbed my camera and went into the bathroom and took that picture. The most embarrassing part of this picture is not the arrangement of my pearly whites, but rather that I am in my pajamas and standing in my ugly bathroom, and that shift, well, kinda brings a tear to my eye.
I am smiling at this (with an even straighter, prettier grin these days) because it was just about 6 months ago now that Stephen and I went "official" as boyfriend-girlfriend. What can happen in a second? Your whole world can take a new direction. I am a smiley, smiley girl, blissfully in love and happy to spend an afternoon day dreaming about living in a house in the suburbs that has a place for me to write, a place for him to garden and a place for us to cook. I want to go back to 2012 and give that girl a hug of gratitude. I have 642 things to write and dream about and so much more.
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