Lindsey Markel Writes About True Things

 Find the two people above in the year 2005—the two blurry people on the left, the ones touching shoulders but not looking at one another. I’m the girl, the one looking nervous. Larry is the boy, looking disaffected. Set your time machines to a painfully bright summer day in mid-July, and find the downtown apartment that he can no longer afford since his ex moved out in the spring. Depending on what time you arrive, you’ll either find us in the kitchen—Larry mixing avocados and lemon juice at the counter and me standing in the doorway behind him, completely blotto with nerves—or, later, sitting politely side by side on his couch, watching a rented copy of Pooty Tang, settling into cold green bottles of beer.

I’m freshly twenty-two, moving back into a dorm room three hours north in less than a month. I know from finding his abandoned MySpace profile that he turns thirty-two in a little under one week. He’s in a rock band—of course he is—this absurdly charismatic and funny lead who every person in every room in every bar either knows or, like me, wants to know. In my journal at home—“home” being the weird, sprawling 1950s house that I’m living in that summer, rent-free in exchange for keeping it clean and lived-in—I’ve copied the words he typed to me earlier that day, about the movie, which he thinks will be terrible: Gonna risk it and watch it tonight….you should come over. The next page is wholly taken up with the following quote, inked over at least twenty times by the time I leave my house for his: If you don’t go, you don’t see.

A few hours after the movie has ended, we’ll be easy to locate: still on that couch, music on the stereo, a book about The Beatles that I’ve pulled from the coffee table still lying open, but now forgotten; the buzzing giddiness of 1:30am, the beer, and our insane crushes on each other all rendering conversation crutches unnecessary.

Find us there on our first night, tipsy and humming with nerves, and tell us that later that week, we’ll be decorating his van with crepe paper nicked from a supply cabinet in his closed office, about to buy a bag of root beer barrels to toss out the windows one by one, keeping the brakes lit on downtown streets, a spontaneous two-person parade. Tell us that in two years, when guests step into the living room of our new shared apartment, Larry will go to my closet and find the scarf I just finished knitting to show it off, quote the number of tens of thousands of stitches it took to make. Tell us how Sydney will squeak from the backseat about the “Series Tower” the first time we take him to Chicago; tell us about our family prayers at dinnertime, how we all hold hands; try not to let our laughing drown out your voice. And just when we’re winding down and about to kick you out, ask us if we’ve talked about marriage yet—we will, somewhere around the 2am mark, agree emphatically that neither one of us is interested in it—and tell us that in six years, not only will we both be married, but we will be married to each other.

How does it all work? How you hear and tell a thousand stories, tracing plot lines and wrangling predictions, scoffing at the obvious, while at the same time, your own story is moving swiftly along, skipping ahead of you? And how wonderful is it to arrive in a place where the seeds have finally sprouted and everything is in bloom? To arrive there together, in the same place, at just the right moment? Or, really, to realize that there is no such thing as the “right” moment. That if you ask us these questions in 2005, as we’re splayed on the couch with the beer gone warm and the book spine stretching, we won’t know what you mean. We’ll look a lot like a summer fling, until we are somehow not. We are in different places in our own stories, then, and the years to come will not be easy, but we will keep moving, even when it aches. And then, miraculously—but not magically—on a weekday morning in 2010, just after autumn has officially arrived, we will talk again about getting married, and from my perspective, in the same place as my friend, surrounded by our own shared life and all the music and stories and color in it, it will not be a difficult decision. To keep on walking with him as my family, to see what happens next and next and next.

(Originally published on youareamongfriends.com)