I've been in love with the same boy since I was seventeen years old. Yes, there were some interruptions along the way during which we weren't exactly speaking and the love wasn't shown. Still, it's been there since our senior year of high school, only growing more over time.
On Friday we went to look for new bedding. I've always loved crisp white linens and bedspreads, but the boy I've loved since I was seventeen finds white to be too cold, too stiff. As though a chambermaid may enter our home and ask him if he would like his linens starched today. He also hates how easily white becomes less white. If it is to be white, it must be clean.
When we started the search for this new, not cold, not white bedding, it was frustrating. He's a bit colorblind, so some of the colors I gravitated towards just looked like an odd muddy tone that wasn't appealing in the least. The ones he saw with clarity were on bedspreads fit for a bachelor, and I used my veto on those, since neither of us is, in fact, a bachelor. Friday proved unsuccessful.
That is, if success meant coming home with new bedding.
As we walked into Target laughing together and enjoying the slowness of a day off together gracefully turning to night, I reached out to hold his hand. As his fingers made there way through mine until they were perfectly intertwined, my heart did a little flutter.
"I still love holding your hand just as much as I did when I was seventeen," I told him.
The little smile, that slight turn upwards of the corner of his mouth, the quiet creasing of his stubbly cheek as his muscles involuntarily responded with pleasure said so much in the silence. His grin, the same grin of the boy of seventeen, spoke the words that have no letters.
Those little moments, the small ones, the ones you might think hold no weight? Those are the moments to treasure. Those are the moments to remember when you're exhausted and angry and all the wrong words have come out and nothing seems right anymore. Those are the moments to revel in on slow Monday mornings over coffee in your softest robe.
Those small insignificant moments of peace and bliss and the butterflies all over again...those are the ones that last the longest. Hold them tightly, like you're seventeen and in love and don't care who knows. It's the simple ones that a life well lived is built on.
