We went to the same high-school, although we rarely spent any time near each other until we graduated. Everybody was passing around yearbooks at a party being held by a mutual friend, and when I got mine back, she had quoted the “and if my sack is full, I couldn’t have holped it” line from As I Lay Dying, which is the most literary come-on I’ve ever received; made all the more intriguing by coming from a brilliant, quiet, reclusive, unbelievably beautiful girl that had barely spoken to me before. We started to get together, visiting museums, hanging out in parks, staying on the phone late at night. I performed a one-man version of Monty Python’s Holy Grail for her and she introduced me to The Cure. By the end of the summer we were completely in love. Unfortunately, we had both already been accepted by separate colleges, so for the next four years, we were torn apart over and over again. Every day while we were away we wrote to each other. I sometimes think this is one of the reasons we’re still together (fifteen years later). She didn’t have to directly experience my occasionally idiotic transition to adulthood, and we got to know each other intimately through thousands of letters.
In between, on summers and holidays, we were inseparable. We learned about sex together, and spent an entire summer exploring each other and losing our virginity. Being in the presence of her astonishingly naked body is the only religious experience I’ve ever had. She was so lithe and curvy, like she had been carved out of a willow limb with a bent knife. Her nipples stood up like fleshy, pink pagodas perched on top of little, porcelain hills, and on the inside of her thighs, just where her legs met her body, were small, cupped hollows, like the space left from the first scoop of ice-cream in a fresh tub. I will hold on to the memory of her taste and scent, and the sound of her voice, and the feel of her flesh beneath my palms as my most precious belongings until I die.
After I graduated, I moved around the country with her while she changed colleges, working up to her doctorate. I’d never traveled anywhere before, and now I’d seen large portions of our country, taken a trip to Europe, collected several cats and even gotten to buy a home with her. Two years ago, she collected and raised over seventy monarch butterflies in a box in our living room, even bringing the pupae with us on weekend trips in case they hatched and needed to be let out while we were away. She visits old graveyards with me, and has spent hours looking for fossils in rocks we found in our back yard. I’ve unpacked boxes after a move and found ticket stubs from movies we saw on our first dates, or some tiny flower I picked up and gave to her on a walk. We’ve never felt the need to be married, and I love that she stays with me simply because she wants to. I know I’m the luckiest person in the world to be with her. She’s introduced to more music and art and science and life than I would have ever known otherwise. She hasn’t changed at all since she was seventeen, other than to grow more beautiful; become even more intelligent. It feels like I wouldn’t even be able to breathe without her.
