Last night, we decided to carve out time to date. Half an hour into our movie, I could hear our 8-year-old coughing upstairs. It’s just his allergies/asthma, but considering the circumstances, it was causing me great distress. I ran back up three times to check up on him, and on the third time, Jeff followed me upstairs and decided to put him to sleep ourselves.
When he fell asleep, Jeff asked me to play Animal Crossing together. It’s this game where you move to a deserted island and create a new home and life. This game has been a bright spot during this quarantine. When I’m feeling anxious, I play a little bit and I feel better. We’ve always just played solo games before, and have been sending each other mail and leaving gifts outside each other’s homes for over a week now.
It was the first time our characters would meet, and the happiness I felt when they finally did felt pure and childlike. And the joy to feel that still, after all this time, knows no bounds. God, I love this man. We met when I was 15, and 22 years of couplehood later, I still genuinely like him, like being around him, like hearing his voice and smelling him, and feel endless affection for him. We spent a good hour running around the island, laughing our asses off.
I would run so fast that he would fall off the frame, and he would simply pop back in beside me out of thin air, like there’s an invisible string that pulls him through space and time to always be near me. And on this third week of quarantine, I find my center. I don’t know what happens from here, and that scares me. But what a wonderful life it has been so far.
In every possible permutation of reality, his atoms will always find my atoms. I am at peace with that.
Leave a Reply