I dug through my T-shirt drawer, and realized that I basically have a few dozen variations on a theme: I love Doctor Who, I love gaming, I love Star Trek, I love Game of Thrones, I like black T-shirts.
At the bottom of my drawer was one I haven’t worn in a long time: a green Stone Brewing Company T that I picked up earlier this year. I pulled it out and shook out the wrinkles. As I closed the closet door, I caught a glimpse of Anne, drying her hair in our bathroom.
I don’t know where the thought came from, but it sprung into my brain: I’m 40 years-old, and I met her when I was 23. I’ve known my wife for almost half of my life.
When she shut off the hairdryer, I voiced this thought to her.
“Wow. We’ve known each other for a long time,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking a lot recently about all the shit we endured when we were starting our life together, and how our kids are almost the same age we were when [shitbag ex-husband] put us all through that. I just can’t imagine being their age and having the strength to deal with that.”
She set the hairdryer down on the sink and looked at me. “Maybe if we had to deal with it alone, but we didn’t. We dealt with it together.”
“I love us so much,” I said.
“Me too.”
We finished getting ready, and headed out to our respective days. Hours later, we met up back at our house.
“I have no idea what do to for dinner,” I said. “Want to walk to the store and figure it out?”
“Sure!”
We held hands and walked to the store, catching each other up on the stuff we did during the day. When we got to the store, we decided on steaks with grilled asparagus and Caesar salad, bought the things we needed to make that happen, and took them home. I prepared the steaks and walked out to the patio to start the charcoal and mesquite wood in our barbecue. Marlowe followed me and sniffed around while I put newspaper into the charcoal chimney.
“This is not for dogs,” I said. She looked back at me as if to say, “everything is for dogs, dummy.”
I pet her head and she wagged her tail. Then she saw a squirrel on the wire and bounded across the yard to go bark at it. The squirrel scolded her, shaking its tail and generally being an asshole.
“One of these days she’s going to get you, squirrel,” I said, “and you’ll regret all the time you wasted teasing her from the safety of your telephone wire.”
I lit the charcoal and went back into the house.
“Do you want to watch a movie?” Anne asked me.
“Sure,” I said. “What do you want to watch?”
She got an impish look on her face and said, “Chupacabra vs. The Alamo.”
I’ve been in the mood for gritty 70s movies like French Connection or Marathon Man, so I hesitated a moment.
“Come on,” she said, “movies like this are my guilty pleasure!”
I laughed. “There is absolutely nothing guilty about your enjoyment of the SyFy originals, and I love how much you embrace their particular brand of cheese.”
Strangely, we’ve never watched either of my entries in this genre: Python or Deep Core, mostly because I don’t know if I could bear to watch myself in them.
I put the DVD into the player and pressed play. We sat next to each other on the couch and had a hell of a good time watching a pretty bad movie that was shot in Vancouver pretend it was in San Antonio. Spoiler alert: the Alamo doesn’t exactly fight the Chupacabras as much as Erik Estrada blows it up for some reason.
We ate our dinner, laughed like crazy and talked about it on Twitter (which was apparently as amusing to lots of other people as it was to us, because we were the only people on Twitter not talking about the basketball game).
While we got ready for bed, I looked at her in the bathroom mirror.
“That was really fun,” I said, around my toothbrush.
“Yeah, that was great,” she said.
“I love us.”
“Me too.”
I <3 me too, mysterious person, but I’ll share me because there’s enough of me to go around.
