Save the Date

“And sometimes the harder you try to hang on to something, the less you can see that.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if it was what people who’ve just been in an earthquake or a tornado felt. When you’re standing among the rubble and wreckage of what just moments earlier had been your life, wondering how you got there and what happened now that everything was destroyed.

She didn’t know what it was like to look and wish and want, always two steps behind the person, always on the edges of their life. What it was like to stand next to someone and know you weren’t registering with them, not in any meaningful way. That you thought about someone a thousand times more than they’d ever thought about you. To know that you were just a face in the crowd scenes while they were center stage. And then, all at once, to have the spotlight finally swing over to you. To suddenly be visible, to be seen, no longer one of the people in the background who never get any lines. To suddenly be in the midst of something you’d only ever looked at from the sidelines. What that felt like when it finally happened, dropped in your lap when you were least expecting it, like a gift you were half-afraid to open.

“Hi, I’m Andie Walker,” she said to the collective group. She gestured to the cute, glasses-wearing guy next to her. “And this is my boyfriend, Clark McCallister.”

Talking about it—about logistics and specifics—would make it real in a way I didn’t yet want to deal with.

But this was everything I had ever imagined it would be, and more.