This Beautiful Life

It's been years, and it's been no time at all. Time has changed her face since the last time you saw each other, but you wouldn't be able to tell; you see so many pictures of her that it's hard to catalog the change. You feel as though you saw her yesterday.

You open the door, invite her inside. It's the first time she's been over to your new place. You never thought you'd be able to afford something like this, and you're bursting with pride. You give her a quick hug, wishing to hold her for longer, but reticent to let your eyes leave her face for even a moment. You give her the grand tour - the kitchen with a little countertop island in the middle, the bedrooms with their mismatched thrift store bedside tables, the decorative towels in the guest bathroom. She's just as excited as you were when you first moved, thrilled on your behalf. 

It's gorgeous, she tells you. Your life is gorgeous.

Dinner is on the stove, a pot of soup boiling away into steam, a fresh loaf of bread in the oven. Her favorite. You have her taste the soup, and she tells you it needs more salt, like she always does. You disagree, and compromise to leave the salt shaker on the table. You pour a couple glasses of the wine she brought for the two of you, and she follows you out the sliding glass door onto the back porch.

It's summer, and the air smells like it, as if the breeze itself can remember the day's heat. Earlier, the asphalt heated up like a dry cast iron skillet. You look over your herb garden, making sure none of them got too sunburnt in the hundred degree heat. She takes the opportunity to marvel at your lush rosemary bush, and picks a sprig, crushing it between her fingers. She rubs the crushed leaves at her pulse points, an old habit that makes you smile fondly. The darkness is scented with rosemary and her shampoo as you update each other on your lives.

What have you learned? she asks you, and so you tell her. You tell her you're learning to trust yourself again, that you're learning how to believe you deserve good things. You tell her you're alone, and you're learning that you can do that without being lonely. You tell her that you learned how utterly beautiful it is to watch the sunrise, and how blissful it can be to drive until the road ends and sing the whole way, and how fast the tree outside your window regrows its leaves once the frost dissipates. But mostly, you tell her that you've learned how possible it can be to fall in love with being alive.

She looks at you with tears in your eyes, and tells you how happy she is for you. Me too, you tell her.

Later, you dance in the kitchen, playing all the songs you would listen to on the long drives you used to take together. You don't notice the bread overcooking until it's too late, the scent of burnt crust under your nose alerting you. The loaf is far too dark when you take it out of the oven, so the two of you laugh and saw the loaf in half to scoop out the unharmed middle. Dipping chunks of it into your bowl of soup, you smile. She was right, it did need more salt.

You have a guest bedroom, but she insists on a sleepover, and you're more than happy to show off the TV in your room and your large collection of Ghibli movies. Spirited Away blares in the background when you wake up a couple hours later, and you turn to look at her. She's still fast asleep on your borrowed pillow, dead to the world around her. You watch her sleeping face for a moment in the shifting light.

A thousand years ago, you were going to a birthday party. One of your close friends had invited you, and you didn't know it at the time, but it would be the last of their birthdays you would attend. You brought a bag of chips, and wrapped up a beloved sci-fi novel in bright turquoise paper. They didn't like books, but you did, and you had not yet learned to tell the difference.

There were no decorations, because decorations were dumb and you were too mature for that. Everyone was uniformed in that strange style of dress where people put a lot of effort into seeming effortlessly gorgeous (you yourself had picked out your favorite cropped hoodie for the occasion). You were all old enough to know that red Solo cups were cool, but not old enough yet to drink anything out of them other than soda.

You were nursing a Diet Coke when she came up to you. Long, messy blonde hair framed her face, her glasses far too round and large, but a sight all the same. Your friend had introduced you to the group when you got there, but you couldn't remember anyone's name. She did not introduce herself to you a second time, but instead by way of greeting, said, you have mustard on your shirt.

You were confused, as you hadn't eaten anything with mustard in it. You looked down at your shirt just in time to watch her finger gently flick your nose back upwards. Nobody had ever played that little trick on you before. You felt like a participant in a magic trick. Your face must have looked quite amusing, because she broke into a huge grin and started laughing. It was infectious; everything about her laugh made you want to join in.

You thought back to that moment as you looked at her, sweet in the blue light, drooling on your pillow. Tomorrow, you would wake up next to her, as you had done so many times before, and you would wake up the same way many times after that. But all you could think about right then was the moment you met. I didn't even know, you thought to yourself. All of this beautiful life was coming, and I had no idea.