Member-only story
That Picture Perfect World Where the Girl Gets the Guy
It’s an ideal for a reason.
I live vicariously through the experiences of those around me.
I’m a good listener who loves when other people talk. I don’t worry about getting a word in — I’d just stumble through my sentences anyway — and I find myself more at ease when someone else leads the conversation.
No one really knows this about me, but I also love hearing all the stories about how so-and-so met and married another so-and-so. I take in the far-off gaze of a woman as she walks back in her memory to that first moment she spotted her someday husband. I hang onto every word as eyes gleam and laughter lines appear.
One story that’s almost become mythic to me is how my mother’s sister and her husband met.
He was sixteen. She was fourteen.
He spotted her across the park as she sat on a bench, removed from the interplay of her friends and his, and he made the effort to talk to her. Just weeks prior she had lost her mother. Neither of them can actually tell me the whole of the conversation they had, but — whatever it entailed — it was enough that he would go into the city just to see her and, eventually, date her.
