For Your Consideration

Imagine the various viewpoints of somebodies life. Perhaps it is somebody you don't know. Maybe your interpretation would go something like this.

Consider this:
We’re going to go on a date, nothing fancy. Perhaps a burger and movie. Afterwards, I will let you walk me home, or vice versa. There will be no touching, we will remain as virginal as a newborn babe for this night, this glorious evening which will consist of red checker table cloths, Italian food (we nixed the burger idea, or we will at any rate. Linguini with mushrooms and white wine sauce is a little more elegant, wouldn’t you say? Lady and the Tramp, they knew where it was at - we’ll just push it up a notch) and coffee, followed by an action movie, any action movie, any movie will do. Consider that.

Rewind:
We met in a cloudy bar, at the end of June. You had bedroom eyes, and I was convinced I had bedroom hair. I spent two hours getting ready for this night, I was fashionably in disarray. You probably spent 15 seconds getting ready, perhaps going out was a split second decision after gorging on pizza or whatever it is you males do in private on a Friday evening, football, beer, fast food. You’re a mess, with ripped jeans and a tattered shirt, but you are tantalizing and I decide right then and there that after my sixth (eleventh) drink I will approach you and insist that you take me home. I get sick after my third and call a taxi. I am destitute. I will never see my smoky Romeo ever again. This is all encompassing for about three hours, for that is how long it takes me to fall asleep, even though the world is still spinning. I will never order a triple anything again.

Fast Forward:
I watch you counting gray hair every morning, as you have for the last six years. Our children are grown and gone, something that I’m sure we both never thought we’d see. The big house is empty, emotionless. You hired a maid on limited funds and she ended up staying for love of the kids, but now she has nothing to do and spends her afternoons playing solitare in the dining room. I can’t understand your fascination with your temples, as you rub them in circular motions and mutter about age spots, stress lines, smile creases. I feel a heavy weight in my stomach as I watch you complete your morning routine (or should I say, mourning). I wish we were 25 again, when  you were confident and glowing, and I was a vagabond out to steal your heart from the moment I laid eyes on you in that musty bar. I had no idea we would come this far, no idea you would make me fall in love. Do I have regrets? Do I wish I had found another woman, one not quite so absorbed in her own aging process? No. How was I to know it would come down to this.

The Present:
My mom and dad are the greatest people I have ever known. Sure, I’m only twelve, but whenever I can, I make my mom tell me the ‘Story of How My Parents Met.’ She always gets this dreamy, far off look in her eyes and leans back in to her chair, sighing, clutching her heart.
“Your father,” she would start, “Was a rascal if I ever saw one.”
When I grow up, I want to marry a rascal. I want to take hours to get ready for a night out, I want to propose a date out of the blue because I lost track of my undisputed embodiment of maleness (this is what she called him, and still does, when he’s not patting his belly, which hangs a little lower than it used to) in a haze of alcohol and smoke, and then come across him barely a week later at the train station on Sixth. I want to change plans, have a small wedding, have three children in three years, and hold hands underneath the sycamore tree in my backyard every night of my married life, with the man I love. I will proclaim that I indeed tamed him, look at this, I managed to capture him and keep him, and how well he behaves in public now! My mom says that if she ever did anything right in her life, it was to go out that night, to the bar. I believe her. My parents are the best match in the world.

Consider this:
Two days before the scene in the bar, before the nervous drinks and the drunken stupor, you go to a Chinese food restaurant. You order some Chow Mein, and it comes with a cookie. Inside of the cookie is a slip of paper, delicately creased and smelling sweetly of the lemon baked in to the crunchy shell of it’s prison. You pull it out, spread it flat on to the table, and chuckle to yourself, for it doesn’t tell you a very decent fortune. It tells you to be wary of strangers. Why, you’re always wary of strangers! Your mother taught you that from the day you were born, and you’ve never seen yourself kidnapped. What do you think of that, little cookie? You pay the bill, check the time, and try out your new saunter past a table full of construction workers on your way to the door.
Your mind wanders as you consider what you will wear on Friday: it’s girls night out, and you want to look your best.