There you are.
I don’t understand them, these words, because they seem too deep and too soulful to attach to the Farmers Market, this Starbucks or that, a frozen yogurt place, or confusion over where to meet a stranger. They’re straining to define a feeling of stunning comfort that drips over me, as if a water balloon burst over my head on the hottest of summer days. My knees don’t buckle, my heart doesn’t skip, but I’m awash in the warmth of a Valium-like hug. Except I haven’t taken a Valium. Not since the night of Lily’s death. Yet here is this warm hug that makes me feel safe with this person, this Byron the maybe-poet, and I want it to stop. This—whatever this feeling is—can’t be a real feeling, this can’t be a tangible connection. This is just a man leaning against a stall that sells giant eggplants. But I no longer have time to worry about what this feeling is, whether I should or shouldn’t be here, or should or shouldn’t be wearing yellow pants, because there are only maybe three perfect seconds where I see him and he has yet to spot me. Three perfect seconds to enjoy the calm that has so long eluded me.
There you are.
And then he casually lifts his head and turns my way and uses one foot to push himself off the wall he is leaning against. We lock eyes and he smiles with recognition and there’s a disarming kindness to his face and suddenly I’m standing in front of him.
“There you are.” It comes out of my mouth before I can stop it and it’s all I can do to steer the words in a more playfully casual direction so he isn’t saddled with the importance I’ve placed on them. I think it comes off okay, but, as I know from my time at sea, sometimes big ships turn slowly.
Byron chuckles and gives a little pump of his fist. “YES! IT’S! ALL! HAPPENING! FOR! US!”
I want to stop in my tracks, but I’m already leaning in for a hug and he comes the rest of the way and the warm embrace of seeing him standing there is now an actual embrace and it is no less sincere.
He must feel me gripping him tightly because he asks, “Is everything okay?”
“No. Yes. Everything is great. It’s just . . .” I play it back in my head, what he said, the way in which he said it and the enthusiasm that had only a month ago gone silent. “You reminded me of someone, is all.”
“Hopefully in a good way.”
I smile, but it takes just a minute to speak. “In the best possible way.”
I don’t break the hug first, but maybe at the same time. This is a step. Jenny will be proud. I look in his eyes, which I expect to be brown like Lily’s, but instead are deep blue like the waters lapping calmly against the outboard sides of Fishful Thinking.
“Is frozen yogurt okay?”
“Frozen yogurt is perfect.”
We sit across from each other with our yogurt, which is a better choice in the August sun than coffee. His is plain and mine is pomegranate. I’m surprised that he looks both exactly like and nothing like his pictures. The way he moves, the way he smiles, it makes him more handsome than anything a still photograph could capture. We run through the usual first-date banter and I start to tell one of my stories and even though it comes off okay, when I finish I tell myself to stop it.
This one is worth being present for.
He is from New Orleans. He used to be a TV news reporter in Las Vegas and I wonder how that is because his hair curls and it moves in the breeze and he kind of looks like the poet his name suggests and nothing like a TV news reporter, at least any that I’ve seen. He’s an uncle like I am an uncle. He’s close with his mother, but not his father. He’s sad about the death of Whitney Houston.
He loves dogs.
“Have you ever been in love?” Byron asks.
I pause and think of Lily, even though I know that’s not what he means. I answer yes because, even if there had never been a Lily, it’s true. I even go so far as to try to mask the pain of it. “You?”
He looks sheepishly at his feet. “I don’t think so.” And then he adds a hopeful “Not yet.”
I recognize in his face the look of someone who has been on a lot of these . . . dates, and I admire his ability to remain hopeful.
“How long was your last relationship?” he asks.
“Six years.”
“How did it end?”
I pause.
“I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“I don’t mind,” I say. “I ended it.”
“Why?” And then with a chuckle, “I have a tendency to be direct.”
I look at him and weigh the advantages of several lines before deciding the best way to answer directness is by being direct in return. “Because I thought I deserved to be treated better.”
“GOOD! FOR! YOU!”