Weblog entry:
- The short walk
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I met her in the lobby of a five-screen movie theatre, and she didn’t look especially happy to see me. It was raining outside — pouring down something torrential, really. It was plain from her face that she could think of at least three other places she’d rather be, none of which included drip-drying in a theatre lobby with a gangly web designer she barely knew.
Eventually, I got her to smile: we taunted the other folks waiting for the movie we were about to watch, paying no mind to the fact that we knew half the dialogue before it was spoken onscreen. Afterwards, we grabbed dinner at a nearby bar; we drank, and laughed, and the withering glance she’d shot me in the beginning of the night was forgotten altogether.
Years from now, the third one together might not seem particularly important — maybe even insignificant. But tonight is a marker, a reference point: in a few minutes, I’ll close my laptop, meet her in the lobby of my office building, and the evening will wax and wane as every other one has done, and the others will continue to do. But as we’re walking toward dinner, toward our thirty-sixth month together, we’ll remember the failures, successes, mishaps and mis-steps of the past years — but they now have another context, a sense of progression. We’ll walk out of the building, hand in hand, taking quiet steps toward something unseen, exciting.
And maybe, just maybe, I’ll get her to smile during dinner tonight.
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