Source: etsy.com via Rachel on Pinterest

Art by the Terrific Nan Lawson

Maybe once a week--or four times if I'm honest--I look around at all these married people and think

"How in the world do two people get so lucky to like each other at the same time...
and then love each other at the same time
and just so happen
to find themselves married

to each other?"

It seems an awfully hard thing to be capable of,
and yet,
so many people are ending up married all the time. I think to myself, why do I (and my friends X and Y and Z) find ourselves
i n c a p a b l e
of being given in marriage?

It seems like a miracle, that two people could end up... together.
It seems like an impossibility that they could procreate and move forward through life educating an offspring about the way it could be more like them.


I have moments in the car where I catch myself thinking I could see myself with a four year old child. Could fill its cup with apple juice, and make it eat broccoli like I make my dogs eat broccoli while we watch Downton Abbey together, and then I can see myself standing in the bathroom making this kid brush his/her teeth seven or eight times a day and then make this kid memorize John Donne and Bible verses and listen to NPR in his/her pre-adolescence.

And then I shake myself out of it. I switch the windshield wipers on and off, and remember that I am incapable.
That I am an aunt, at best.
I give my phone number accidentally to pot-head snowboarders some nights so that when they leave me voicemail, I can pretend that my dance card is full.

But what Roxanne says, is that we are independent women. That we are going to college (although she hasn't actually taken classes yet).
But as I sip my iced tea, what beats under my black collared t-shirt, down in my heart, in my sore burpee'd out chest is this:

I want to find myself married against somebody who wants to have children that brush their teeth eight times a day as well. That I might be capable of this. That we could make coffee for each other in the morning (in an alternating fashion) and that somehow we could make one world out of two selfishnesses. That we could sew the two worlds into one Frankenstein monster, and still be happy that we are waking up next to each other.

Roxanne snickers.
I know I will keep suffering my horror dreams alone for now.