Pink Ochre Magazine

I stared across the vast chasm of time and space at the woman standing across the driveway, taking in the heavy-lidded green eyes flecked with yellow starbursts, the blond hair with streaks ranging from cafe au lait to dark chocolate, the faded jeans with strategically placed tears,  the oversized T-shirt with the fashionably stretched neckline. This woman who smiled tentatively, in the hope that she had not sown in vain the bread crumbs she had dropped all evening, clues a savvy individual would have picked up on much earlier. 

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Alas, I was not that savvy individual.

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She had trailed me out of the bar as I beat a hasty exit toward the Metro. To call it a happy hour would be aspirational, the lot of us commiserating in a dive down the street from our office, the only other patrons the regulars grumbling over their Heinekens. Rumored layoffs had lent a funereal air to life amid the cubicles. But I sensed opportunity while others wallowed. Even a meager severance payout might spur me to pack up my few belongings, take off for a point unknown, and start a new life away from the constant reminders of everything that had made me miserable this past year. 

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Yet here I stood, across from this friend of a co-worker, whose name I didn't even know, neither of us thinking anything of cosmic significance would take place as we stood athwart a nondescript parking entrance to a nondescript office building in the nondescript suburb where I toiled at my nondescript job.

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Then, the Big Bang, the words that would launch a relationship that would explode, implausibly, out of that uninspired setting to form an ever-expanding universe.

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"Hey, shy guy, what are you doing tonight?" 

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I like to imagine the cosmos pausing to contemplate taking the plunge for thirteen billion years of expansion, making do with the particles present at the creation, the same matter condemned to being neither created nor destroyed. Like the heavens taking a beat before unleashing their fury to create clusters and super clusters of galaxies, time stood still as I let her words hang between us.

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Peering across that vast chasm of concrete, I realized the question was more than a simple inquiry about my plans for the evening. Something about the tilt of her head, the expectant smile, those eyes that grew wider each second I kept her waiting, told me she was feeling, despite the armor she donned every day, the same rumbling belly and shaky knees I was experiencing.

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I had no idea her question would set in motion a life together that would launch into the world two brand new human beings who never would have graced this rock hurtling through space if a woman hadn't taken a chance on a guy obviously beneath her station to ask a question so profound that lives depended on it. Hyperbole, perhaps. But what better reason to wax enthusiastic than matters of the heart.

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In that moment I stood, paralyzed, as is my wont, attempting to calculate if I wanted “tonight" to mean anything more than just that night, and if I was ready for the ramifications of any answer that wasn't an excuse to get on my way, alone, to the subway and my empty apartment. Ramifications I forced myself to weigh after a couple too many beers at the end of a forgettable workday, as dusk set in on a late summer evening, the cooler night air hinting at the possibilities of autumn.

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This was too much to contemplate, standing there in my black Chuck Taylors, in faded jeans too baggy for my bony ass, and a black longsleeve T-shirt, the loose fabric billowing where shoulders would normally take up the slack. Every inch of the get-up a white flag raised at the futility of trying to pass as a grown man in his midtwenties, let alone someone worthy of the curiosity of the woman standing across from him.

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I cast aside those doubts—about myself, about her reasons for seeking me out, about the possibilities for us—to consider, for seconds that seemed like minutes that might as well have been eons, those bread crumbs. Her smile when she caught me looking her way; a smile I should have seized on as an invitation but instead averted my eyes to contemplate the label of my beer bottle. Jumping up to help me retrieve the next round from the bar, my mumbly answers to her small talk not deterring her from pursuing me. Hooting and giving me a thumbs up when I requested that a co-worker play “I Will Dare” on the jukebox. Laying bare an attraction hiding in plain sight, for everyone to see but me. 

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All of it adding up, as I stared across that now-shrinking chasm, to acceptance—of myself, of her interest in me, of my interest in her, of trading my solitary inertia for the entropy of our closed system, of the need to let the universe do its thing, no matter where that thing ended up taking us.

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"I don't know. What do you feel like doing?"

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Kapow!