From Every Day I Love You More (just not today)
I was in love with the whole world
And all that lived in its rainy arms. – Louise Erdich
Samantha headed west from Boston in a search for clean air, mountain streams, and adventure. She found all that and more on her two-week vacation. She also found love, the kind she never knew existed, the kind that’s eluded her all her life.
Matthew is a third-year law student with blue eyes, sandy hair, and a passionate streak. He is funny and brilliant and kind. I haven’t met him as yet, but I feel as if I had, as do most of Samantha’s close friends. She has a habit of starting her sentences these days with, “You know what I love about Matthew?” Having met her for lunch a few hours ago, I now know dozens of things that she loves about Matthew: his sweetness, his intellect, his smile, and his charm, to say nothing of his love for her. I can also imagine what I was like years ago, when I first met my partner for life: preoccupied, giddy, giggly, and obsessed; in short, much like Samantha is now.
And while there are moments I wish she’d act like her old self, I find myself seeking her out. To borrow a cup of the stuff she exudes. To feel that old feeling again. To remind myself – and my husband – the feeling’s still there, underneath all these layers of years. “You know what I love about Matthew?” Samantha asked me, dreamily sipping her glass of iced tea. “He loves the way I say ‘Yeah.’” Then she said it and said it, again and again, experimenting with her inflection: “Yeah.” “Yeah.” “Yeah.”
“You know what I love about my husband?” I asked, suddenly wanting to play the game, too. “The way he makes Michigan on his hand.” Samantha looked at me blankly as I tried to explain how he uses the back of his hand as a map of the state where he’d lived before we met, pinpointing the location of various towns with the index finger of his other hand. I remembered when and where we had kissed the first time, on a Sunday in New York’s Central Park. My nose started running a bit in the cold, and he handed me a white handkerchief. I thought about all the times he’s done that since, how automatic that gesture’s become. But that was the first time, and I was utterly charmed that he carried cotton instead of paper tissues. How many times have I laundered those squares? How many tears have I shed? All the highlights of my married life flooded back, countless moments of sorrow and joy. And all this because my friend has fallen in love. I was beginning to love Matthew, too.
God knows, love’s first act doesn’t last very long, though we feel its effects all our lives. Those first glossy hours stay with us forever, helping to keep us aloft, like the beaten egg whites folded into the batter to add lightness and height to a cake. While we tend to lose sight of them once they’re whisked in, there are always those streaks that don’t blend. They’re the laughter that breaks through the stress on bad days; magic moments that transcend the years. But they’ll never again look precisely the way that Samantha is seeing them now: lustrous and cloudlike and so full of air it’s as if they will never deflate.
The smile that lights my friend’s face as she speaks is as dazzling as beaten egg whites. “You know what I love about Matthew?” she asks, for the third time in less than an hour. And I smile back. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
