If We Can Get Around It

You don't often get to hear the songs that people have set as your ringtone.

It's not for you to hear, really. It's a private thing they've decided on. It's supposed to only play when you're not around.

You're not supposed to hear it.

***

We didn't have a lot of money these last few weeks. It had leaked out, from bills and traveling. Car payments and speeding tickets. Life.

We'd talked about the things we wanted and needed, the few things that came up from time to time, as things do.

In a wave of nostalgia, we wished we could find our copy of Guitar Hero 2, the game we'd played ad nauseum that spring when we decided to give it another try. We'd played it, even, earlier on the day he asked me to date him again. We played it until the songs wove their ways into our muscle memory, programmed in our brains in a way that can make you really respect the human body.

On Tuesday, I showed him how my every day shoes were falling apart. Purchased for 19.99 the day before Easter and worn almost every weekday since, I knew they couldn't be long for this world. And a closer examination revealed that the soles are peeling from the uppers, the inside of the sole worn unevenly. "I need new shoes," I said. He inquired size, and I told him, "Six." He was being not-so-sneaky, and today as I left the lab, I told Janet, "I'm pretty sure I'm getting new shoes for Christmas."

***

Comcast somehow didn't take money out of our account for automatic payments, and this pay period has too many weekends. And I had already borrowed money from him, and there wasn't that much money left this week for groceries. And we were out of the Diet Coke that we drink in 24-pack boxes, one of the many many vices we have and pay for.

And the kitchen is crack-house dirty from too much cooking, and the sink was full of dishes, and I asked him before I left home to please please please unload the dishwasher so I could load it again while I made dinner. And suddenly, we're everyman, full of money worries that could be alleviated by going out less and stuck in conversations about household chores and how we'll be cooking fish for dinner.

***

After a long but satisfying day, with two happy bosses--for the first time ever?--I dragged my cold self home, listening to a CD I had burned as a sophomore in college. The best songs by some of the lamest artists, including Nine Days, who sang these lyrics in a song that now skips every time I play it:

The answers we find,

Are never what we had in mind.

So we make it up as we go along...

We make it up as we go along, I thought. Yes, we do.

***

So, I get inside, and Joey is standing in the bedroom in his boxers, working his way through the songs on Guitar Hero 2.

And I take off my pants to put on pajamas, and he tells me not to take off my socks. But I think he's dicking around, and I take them off because that is easily in the top five most satisfying moments of every day.

But then, he comes over to give me a kiss and says, "I have a present for you."

And goddammit, if it isn't a new pair of every day shoes.

***

"Thank you!" I say. "I love them." [i do] "Are they my Christmas present?"

"No," he says. "You needed new shoes. I got you some."

***

And of course, the dishes have been put up, and he put the ones from the sink into the dishwasher. And when we sit down to watch TV-on-the-internet and eat M&Ms, he asks if I want a Diet Coke. And if it weren't so stupid to be so sentimental about Guitar Hero and shoes, about dishes and Diet Cokes, then I would have cried.

Or is it stupid to be happy that someone pays attention and then spends their two-weeks paycheck on the things you need? Is it really so stupid to want to cry when someone loves you that much?

Because that's what it is. On the surface, it's a lot of things that don't seem to matter that much. But somewhere else, there's that girl who will never forgive herself for hurting him. I never expected him to give me anything. Much less everything. The least of these things being Diet Coke and shoes. The most being unrelenting love and a fresh start at being ok.

***

So, after TV night, I get up to do work.

[I do this a lot lately, work in the later hours after he has gone to sleep. I lie in bed with him for an hour or two, watch TV while he drifts off, and then slip out to the den. It's a weird pattern, one that I've seen many scientists fall into. We spend as much time as we can with our families. Then, while they're asleep, slip back to science. God, it's weird.]

He is on the verge of nodding off, but he wants to find his phone. So I call him in the living room, and stand still to locate where the sound is coming from.

And in the bedroom, the ringtone I didn't know was set for me.

"Well, it's you...I fell into."

Oh, but boy--you don't know the half of it.