7 years ago, yesterday evening. I was smiling like an idiot all day. The handsome young man with all his bright and shininess, was supposedly coming to see me that night at work. But I kept trying to squash the hope that I would see him there. My experience was that men in New York City say a lot of nice things and rarely live up to them.
I watched the fireworks over the East River from a folding chair on Vernon Ave with my friend Justin. I thought, damn. I love Long Island City. That’s when my love affair with my little piece of Queens began. Something else was beginning, too.
There he was!!! My heart skipped three beats as he walked in wearing a baseball shirt and jeans. Hah. The first time I had seen him he was wearing a bowler hat and the mish mashings of a suit. He was like a shining light in my periphery. Still, I quelled hope rising in me. The men I meet in NYC are usually douche bags. I couldn’t imagine he’d be any different.
The crazy rush of my shift ended as abruptly as it began, late that evening. In one hour I made $400 in tips. I decided to sit outside at a table in his line of sight. I settled into my burger and tried to look available, taking small infrequent bites. Unfortunately, I was looking too available. The beponytailed Queens Guy took the invitation before the other could accept, and before I knew it he was reaching for my earrings in an uninvited and inappropriately intimate gesture. I was about to remove them from the reaches of my neck and just give them to him so he would leave me alone when the bright and shiny young man came over and politely asked for him to leave me alone. How chivalrous I thought, containing my overwhelming glee.
Before I knew it, there he was. Sitting before me. When I looked into his eyes, I was swimming in their earth and oceans colored optimism. It was souls reaching through eyeballs, desperately twining itself around his kindred spirit. We sat there, gazing into each other, both of us knowing something we were not prepared to know. He was my other, and I was his, and how the hell did we just figure that out???
And then, in a gesture as awkward as it was one of the most marvelous things ever to happen, as I told a story about snow in Rancho Cucamonga, he leapt across the table in a fit of impulse, love, despair, I don’t know what, and kissed me. When he sat back down, I didn’t know what to say, but his eyes looked like a thirst had been quenched. It was discovery, madness, hope, realization, epiphany. And he loved me. Hah, I didn’t even know his last name and he loved me. And I loved him, and it felt insane.
This was the man I fell in love with, but little did I know that over seven years of loving, fighting, growing, changing, and traveling the world together, he would become so so much more than that. It’s been seven years and I don’t feel remotely itchy. I feel like time has zoomed right by, and I feel like I can’t remember life before or without him.
Happy Anniversary, Huz.
by punambean