The Happier Anniversary

Little sweetheart, as hard as all these days of March are, there is also the remembrance that years before the saddest, most tragic anniversaries there were the happier, glorious ones of our finding each other. You always used to relish saying that you found me and I quite like the idea of that and believe it too.

All of these days were coming so fast and biding us sweetly together one after the other that’s it’s a matter of some debate as to what might definitely be our anniversary but I think we kind of settled or seized upon this day - the 19th, two days after Paddy’s Day - as the one.

I’m so keen to write at great length about all of those days, everything I can remember, everything I can conjure and bring up and in the kind of detail that even Proust would envy. And there’s so many days and events and things.

There’s our first kiss, which was actually a few days before this and is a whole other story in itself. And there’s quite a lot of detail around even this moment I’m about to describe, so - just for now - I’m going to limited it to one story from that first night that we came to settle upon as our “first”. 

I won’t say just now how you walked hand in hand with me the first time down the little alley and into the basement apartment where they were putting me up - which, because it was in San Francisco had a back balcony, being on a giant hill, the “basement apartment” was above ground on one side. I won’t talk about how you sat at the little kitchen table and when I asked you if you’d like a tea or a diet soda, you requested a cup of boiling water (which I’d come to understand and find totally normal). I won’t talk about how you were cold, so that I wheeled over the space heater from the little bedroom into the kitchen where you leaned right up against it. I won’t talk about how instantly I told you every single thing - some I’d never told another soul - about me and what was going on in my life that worried and upset and I feared had formed, or rather dis-formed me. And I certainly won’t go into what happened just moments later. Not just yet. That’s for another time.

But I will just say it was our first time. That I didn’t have a car and that the theatre was putting me up in Bernal Heights while they were down in the Marina, which is about as far, one from other, that you can get neighborhood-wise in SF. That I’d mostly had to rely on rides from the rather unpleasant SM but that you had said you would drive me home, now. It was second time you had. And actually you asked me to drive your car. We parked on a hill. Duh, I know it’s SF. But this was a particularly steep incline and I had the parking break on. We talked for the longest time. You in the passenger seat and I behind the wheel. You’d broken three of your toes the night of the dress rehearsal, flying from one side of the stage to another during a quick change and banging into some errant piece of scenario, a stair unit, I think, and had one of those enormous boot casts on. After quite a while of talking very animatedly but not at all yet anything like erotic, you suddenly swung that enormous boot over the steering wheel and my head, reached for the seat release under me by the driver’s side door at the floor of the car, yanking it hard so that I was immediately flat on my back and you on top of me kissing me with every hint of what was to come.

The Kiss of Life. “Well, hello”. I finally got it. You finally made your thoughts and intentions known.

Thank god, little sweetheart. How could I be so dense? Thank god - always and literally - for you. After we caught our breath, I asked, “um… would you like to come in?”. You did. And... to be continued.

There’s more to detail and I know there’s more to come. This is our happier anniversary, one of them. And someday soon, as soon as heaven will allow, I pray that you will jump into my lap and wrestle me to the ethereal ground with just as much force and love if not more so.

Yours forever, my darling…