On Monday 22 July 2002, while spending the summer in Boston after having relocated to Poland, I wrote in my journal,
I’ve been thinking about K. I’ve been thinking that I should tell her my thoughts first thing when I see her in a little over a month. I’ve been thinking that there’s no way she can say anything but no. I’ve been thinking there’s no way she can say anything but yes. I’ve been thinking it’s the best thing I can do. I’ve been thinking it’s the dumbest thing I can do.
It had all begun several months earlier, when K and I were at a wedding together. One of my former students was marrying her next-door neighbor, and as we’d both volunteered to be photographers as our wedding present, we spent the whole evening more or less together. Some time in the early morning hours, K and I had stepped outside for a bit of fresh air and a break, and our conversation turned to love and perfect matches. “I’d like to meet someone who… someone who…”
And then the words came out of my mouth, and I thought, “Did I just say that?” Later in my journal, addressing K, I turned to that wedding:
At B’s wedding, we went for a walk around the hotel, and as we talked, I said something that quite surprised even me. “I’d like to meet someone like you,” I said, and immediately you replied, “No, you wouldn’t.” You gave a reason why not – I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember exactly what it was. You tried to say something about some perceived fault – I think you said you were too indecisive or something like that. Honestly, I wasn’t listening to what you said. I was thinking over and over, “Did I just say that?”
“I’d like to meet someone like you”? But I’d already met her, why someone like her?
I first met K when she was still in high school — a senior — and I was a teacher in a neighboring village. It was in a bar/disco, and she and two friends walked up to me, the new American in the area (one of three in a ten-mile radius, thanks to the Peace Corps), and said, “We want to practice our English!” We’d become friends quickly, and our conversations were relaxed and pleasant. When she’d moved to Krakow to go to university, I’d visited her a few times, and over the years, I’d come to take our friendship as a given, like she was a sister or something. Romantic attraction never really crossed my mind. The thought of saying, “I’d like to meet someone like you” to someone who could have been — well, it was just unthinkable. Yet I couldn’t think of anything else.
Since then, though, I’ve been thinking about it. Sometimes almost constantly. And the more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense. We both want the most basic things out of life: a family, a house in some quiet place, a secure relationship. “It just makes so much sense,” I say to myself.
Apparently it did make so much sense and continues to make so much sense, for ten years later, nothing has changed: I’m still as in love with her now as then. No, that’s wrong: more so.
Something has changed; indeed, everything has changed. We’ve brought two children into the world, who have become the source of all our mutual joys and worries. We’ve got a house that adds to those worries, though with a different type of urgency. We’ve moved to an entirely new continent since then. We have new friends, new cars, new everything. Yet only new from the perspective of the journal writer of ten years ago, fretting away about what he was to do about this newly discovered attraction. Now everything is comfortably worn, like slippers that just fit the foot and bend just right. Comfortable. As it should be.