Frozen in Time
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Where it started
She said yes
August 19, 2006
Twenty years later
August 19, 2006
A geometry class. A grocery store. The two times I got it right.
Sophomore geometry class, and I never once had a pencil. Ashley thought I was loud and a little immature — she wasn't wrong. I thought she was out of my league. Our teacher paired us for a project near the end of the semester, and that's when we found out, almost by accident, that we made each other laugh. I asked her to dinner not long after: a borrowed truck, Chili's, and a dessert split two ways because we were both broke. I waited until she was safely inside before I drove away.
College put three hours between us, and for a while we made it work — weekend visits, long phone calls, the kind of certainty only teenagers have. Then the visits got harder to plan and the calls got shorter, and somewhere in there, without either of us deciding to, it ended. Not with a fight. Just distance winning. We stayed cordial. We stopped talking regularly. I built a life that didn't have her in it. So did she. Neither of us talked much about why.
We'd both moved back home by then. I ran into her in the cereal aisle of a grocery store, and we started talking like no time had passed at all. Coffee, a week later. Then another one. This time it was slower — more careful, the way you handle something you've already lost once. We weren't the same two kids who'd fallen for each other in geometry class. I liked who we'd become even more.
A sunset walk on a beach vacation, and I was so nervous I nearly left the ring in the hotel room. She cried before I even got the question out. A little over a year later, an outdoor wedding for 150 people, a father-daughter dance to "Butterfly Kisses," and cans tied to the bumper as we drove off into whatever came next. This time, neither of us was in a hurry to find out.
A borrowed truck, Chili's, and a shared dessert.
Our friends already had a nickname for us.
And then, not long after, three hours apart.
A grocery store, a cereal aisle, and no time lost at all.
A sunset walk, and a ring I almost left behind.
150 guests, cans on the bumper, and "Butterfly Kisses."
A fixer-upper. We learned wallpaper is terrible, together.
The house got louder, in the best way.
Family of four, officially and completely.
Sunrise at Haleakalā, and a helicopter ride I planned in secret.
I started coaching the kids' football team. Ashley hasn't missed a game since.
Marked quietly — pizza, and the kids old enough to tease our dancing.
Two decades since that outdoor wedding — still choosing her, every time.
Twenty years. I keep doing the math in my head like it's going to come out different.
I still think about borrowing a pencil off you in geometry class, because I never once brought my own. You probably remember it differently — you remember that I never shut up. Both true.
That first date, Chili's, my dad's truck. I was so nervous I don't think I actually ate anything. I do remember I didn't want the night to end, so I just kept driving around after, in no hurry to take you home.
Then college happened, and I did something dumb: I let three hours on a map turn into the reason we stopped talking. It wasn't a fight. We just got quiet, and then we got used to being quiet, and five years went by like that. I built a life without you in it. It worked fine. It just wasn't this.
Then I saw you in a grocery store — cereal aisle, of all places — and every plan I had for the rest of my life rearranged itself in about four seconds. We got coffee. Then more coffee. I was a lot more careful with you the second time. You don't get many chances to not screw up the same thing twice.
I almost left the ring in the hotel room the day I proposed. Ask anyone, I don't plan ahead — I already told you that. But I got it right when it counted, and you cried before I even finished the sentence.
Twenty years and two kids later, I coach their football team on Friday nights, and you haven't missed a single game. They think it's funny that I still cry at Disney movies and that you take four hundred pictures of everything. They're right about both. I still open your car door because my dad taught me to, and because I want to. I make the coffee every morning because it's about the only thing I make that you don't have to fix afterward.
Here's what twenty years taught me, half of it with you and half of it trying to find my way back to you: love isn't about never growing apart. Ours did. It's about choosing each other again when you get the chance — and I'd choose that grocery store, that cereal aisle, all of it, every single time.
Happy twenty years. I'd marry you again tomorrow. This time I'd double-check I have the ring.
Every road led me back to you.
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