Twenty-two years ago today I celebrated Easter by having pizza and a fountain coke in Washington Square Park with a boy on our lunch break from our tech assignment for our college major (drama). As I remember it I was wearing gray sweat pants pulled up to just below the knee and a short sweatshirt in some peachy pink sort of color and I can't remember but will bet you actual dollars to real live donuts that my heavily permed hair was in some version of a side ponytail. It was the end of our Spring Break and I had been working 16-18 hours a day in a darkened theatre the whole time and for the first time in months it was warm enough to sit outside. Some might have called our impromptu picnic lame but it felt anything but.
Looking back from the vantage point of today I can see how goofy and out of control we both were in word, thought and deed. At the time, though, there was spark. Or something. Whatever it was we stayed together for either 5 or 7 years after that point depending on how you count it and we marked Easter and/or April 4th as our anniversary.
It took us a few years to bother about the date. I said to ChemE, "We just celebrate on Easter because who knows what date it was back then." She replied, "It was April 4th."
We stayed together for one more anniversary after the year we forgot it entirely. Somewhere around the 8th we sat side by side on a subway car talking about something else. One of us mentioned the date and we both went silent and looked at each other. Then we looked away. Then we made extremely lame plans to make it up to each other. In that moment of silence, though? We both thought, "Ding! This relationship is cooked."
And it was and I don't spend every April 4th wishing myself back into it. If anything I take a moment to thank my lucky stars I'm no longer at the same place I was on that subway car having determinedly stopped counting my life sentence. I think about the pseudo-picnic, though. The pizza was delicious and my veins ran with coca cola and Easter never meant anything to me but that seems like the nicest celebration of it I've ever participated in. It was a new beginning, it was something briefly special.
And then we crucified it.
Whoops.
Better luck next time.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
The Reseurrection and the Light
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I can't decide which I like better the memory or the way you write about it.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, the Easter weekend I remembered this morning was the Easter/birthday one in which we pilgrimed to Mecca, I mean, Wilmington, you helped me buy shirts to go with my sexy new skirt, and I made some sort of excuse for an Easter breakfast. Ranks right up there as one of the best (coming in a distance second was the Easter in which I puked on the steps of the church...).