It Had To Be True

It’s the small talk in the night. Lying side by side. Whispering back and forth about what’s passed or what’s possible.

Parameters. How well do you know each other? More importantly how much do you trust the person lying next to you?

Much fiction may be written in this situation. Such and such happened you might say, but maybe it didn’t. But a lie is told for some reason.

And any talk about future happenings is all creative speculation.

I remember the first time it happened. The woman with whom I was fortunate to love like none before. Lying with her that night, after a hard day at work. When you click, you know? That moment you come together. The kiss settling in is more than just a kiss.

Sometimes it’s just lust. I’ve been there, too. But this was that first time for me. It was love. And I knew it the way your gut knows it, the way you understand for the first time what having a sore heart means. That instantaneous longing for the other, like oxygen, a need.

And it was dark on the south side of Madison. We lay in such a way that moonlight fell across us, and she was beautiful, the way a dancer is beautiful. A strong build, and a perfect posture that stays with them even when they rest after having made love. Like the cooling down after the dance.

We whispered to each other things. Those I hoped were true from her, and those I tried my best to tell truthfully to her, although all these many years later the mind is fogged and plays tricks in that shadowland of grays. So maybe not.

And then the dream I knew not to talk about so soon. The one I’d imagined since the first time I met her. But then she brought it up, and I thought how strange and wonderful that she should be thinking about it, too. How amazing that the other person feels the same.

Which almost came to pass.

We would walk Blue Mounds one day and come upon a tiny chapel nestled among the field of tombstones.

“We should have the ceremony here,” she would say.

I would know at that moment, in that same gut way, that she was right.

“When should we do it?” I would ask.

“Soon,” she’d say, “soon.”

As we lay there that first night, we together envisioned, all of this ahead with her beside me. A wish we wished to be fulfilled together about a future with us together, which almost came to pass.