To The Only Valentine I’ve Ever Had

The first night I met my wife I got into a fistfight she didn’t watch. I met her at a high-school basketball game when I was 15 years old. At the time, varsity sporting events were well-attended because in a town as small as ours almost any event you didn’t have to imagine was worth your time.

I’d mentally committed to punching a kid in the face midway through the first quarter of that game. I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me. But kids, especially teenage boys, are dumb and always creating threats that aren’t really there. Me and the kid I committed to punching kept escalating things from what started as a few sideways glances. Glances turned to stares. He said something to me. I said something to him. Back and forth, back and forth. Finally, he said something about my mom and I told him that If he said something about my mom I’d kill him.

This kid never knew my mom and never got to know my mom, as it turns out.

When the halftime buzzer sounded, the entire student section stood up as one and went with us, outside onto a bridge which marked the end of school property. Somehow, we’d had enough sense of convention to take the fight off school grounds properly. Why? I don’t know, but I was concerned about property lines up until the point I got punched in the mouth and my lip smashed against the bottom row of my teeth and spread out like a sheet.

If you’ve ever been punched in the face, you know what I’m saying. Getting punched in the face is kind of like getting baptized. You’re immersed into an experience such that, after full immersion into the thing, the whole world is full of shit you’ve never thought about before. Like the weird taste of your own blood, or how to best kick someone in the face with a sandal on.

After the fight, I walked back to the gymnasium with his shirt in my hand as a receipt of something I felt was very important because I thought I had won every one’s attention. But as kids worked their way back into the gymnasium and up to the bleachers, I saw a girl who’d never made it to the bridge. In fact, I don’t think she ever moved.

It’s with this I can confidently tell you — as confident as I’ve ever been about anything, and as confident as I ever will be about anything — that my wife has never had anytime for my shit and I’ve loved her from the moment this was clear to me.

I saw her later that night, after soaking my hands in hot water and washing my mouth out with cheap booze. Since then, I’ve never stopped loving how unsympathetic she is to things that don’t ultimately matter. Later that night she told me that fighting is mostly stupid, even as a last resort.

But eventually she became a little less immovable.

I remember when we first started spending whole days together, more and more.

I remember one of the first times we went swimming, even though she was shy about being seen in her bathing suit, and about getting into a pool. She went into a little pump house which sat behind the pool to dress, took her dry clothes off, folded them into a pile, and came out in a blinding, bright orange strings of fabric. Watching her pop in and out of the water was a religious experience for me, in that I formed some deeply held beliefs about life that day.

She was so pretty she made me nervous. I wasn’t thinking about church bells. I wasn’t thinking about love songs. I wasn’t thinking about the mark her footprints would eventually make on the sands of my inner-most soul. I was wondering how much time I had before she left me. It turns out that young men think a lot about violence, nudity and death. Some things never change.

And to that point, she hasn’t left me yet — should you need any reason to believe in miracles, or else something more grand and providentially kind than stupid, teenage love.

I see her now as the big, brown-eyed overseer of everything that’s important to me, and most everything I’ve ever wanted — a house and three young kids. I’m thankful for her ability to say the things she means, and not the things I want to hear.

I don’t know how else to say that, but would tell anyone who has made it in a long relationship or this far in my little narrative that nothing else matters. Nothing too physical or cosmetic or visceral. The basis for any meaningful relationship should really take the form of a single question:

Can I trust the things coming out of your mouth? Check yes or no.

Happy Valentines Day, everybody.