By: "Meli'kte"

Q and I were married less than a year after we met. We met at the home of a mutual relative who in turn comes from a respectable family of mutual relatives who had long ago given up trying to get Q and I to meet each other. They tried for about 5 years but we were never where we were supposed to be so "chance" meetings at planned events flopped and "set up" dates were nothing that either of us ever agreed to. We were just going to go about working hard, travelling about and being lost to reason. Our mutual relative is full of love and stories. I went to help him celebrate something private and important: being cancer-free for a year after a hurricane of surgeries and chemotherapy.

Q showed up for an evening of politics. Our mutual relative speaks politics well. A language that I have never learnt to read nor write in. I speak it haltingly; I prefer pictures. I can assure you, in politics, Jane and Spot play hard but the ball always ends up in the gutter. My mother is a smart woman, she insists that people get the government that they deserve. I say that we never stood a chance. Only the mighty get what they deserve.

Q and our mutual relative come from the proud lineage of aristocratic men who believe that they understand politics. The only reason that they are alive is because they live in America and nobody else listens to them. The generation before them who spoke politics on a regular basis, at least the ones that I knew and loved, ended up dead or otherwise incapacitated. That is why I have a certain affinity to men who speak politics. They remind me of men I loved deeply, men who cared about their country in unfathomable ways and who believed that words are much mightier than swords. They were wrong. One of them was my father. I was aware that when I sat down to tea that afternoon, Q and our mutual relative were speaking politics in a way that my father and his good men used to. Loudly, emphatically and in their world, for sure, Spot and Jane were going to get the ball back somehow.

Q is a man from a world that is parallel to reality. This is why we are always happy. We live in a place that is neither here nor there. "My cousins," (there are hundreds of people who are "my cousins"), are the only other people that I knew who were living just in this parallel realm. Q fit into my life, I fit into his.

The first person who knew this was another visitor that dropped in for tea that day. Someone who is as close to me as my own mother. She came with her daughter. Polite tea. Q, the mutual relative, my mother figure, her daughter and myself. "Ibacachu shai TeTu." Real abesha sit-down afternoon tea. You know as well as I that it is hard to get to know somebody very well over such affairs. The mother figure and daughter left in an hour or two. By now, mind you, Q and I have known each other for less than 3 hours. The daughter of the mother figure told me, months later, when I phoned to tell them that Q and I were engaged to be married, that the mother figure had said, as they departed after the tea, that she was happy that she had just met "yelijen bal". I told you that she is like a mother to me. Her daughter reminded her that I had just met Q that day, she being my age, reminded her mother that Q and I did not know each other well enough to have set a date for the movies, let alone our wedding. The mother figure just smiled and said, "tayalesh, yigabalu". Some people have the knowledge of these things.

Q was supposed to leave after tea. He kept saying that he had a barbeque at a friend's. He kept staying. At suppertime, he was still there. I was still there, as was the mutual relative, a relative of the mutual relative who was related to me and not Q and the daughter of the mutual relative. She would, less than a year, later be my maid of honor. That night though, we all had pasta in the kitchen.

I looked at Q's hands when he poured my wine. (As an aside: many years before, after college and before graduate school, I used to waitress. I had just served a man his drink and was writing his order when he raised the glass to take a sip. I saw his hands in good light for the first time and asked him if he was related to a certain "so-and-so". The man spluttered, "He is my brother, but how the hell did you know?" I told him that they have the same hands. "So-and-so" was a college friend of mine. He was an aspiring filmmaker then; now, he is becoming famous. He was not famous then. This man told my friend "so-and-so" that a waitress had picked him out his brother just by looking at his hand. For a time there, I think they thought of me as some kind of witch. Who ever heard of that, recognizing brothers just by looking at their hands. In a restaurant, in a city that neither of them lived in.

Anyway, I looked at Q's hands and I started to fall in love with him.

He did not call. I wanted him to call and say hello but he had not asked for my number so I could not expect him to call. I just wanted him to call and say hello. To this day, as I am writing this, I can see his hand as he poured the wine. I was starting to fall in love with him. I can truly say that I had never felt like that.

He called the daughter of the mutual relative. She is one of my closest friends and a first-order cousin. I don't know about your family, in my family, first-order cousins are not necessarily your first cousins. First cousins can be first-order cousins but first-order cousins can originate from a more distant branch of the family tree. But they are the ones that you spend your life with.

The next week Q, my first order cousin who would be my maid of honor less than a year later and Q's first order cousin (who I knew from high school), and who would be Q's best man less than a year later and myself all had dinner together. We left when the restaurant was about to close. Q and I went to coffee. We left when that coffee shop closed and went to a diner where they never close but where if you sit too, too long the customers in line eat you for breakfast. So we left.

It was time for the sun to come out so we drove to a place that faced east. The sun did not rise that morning. It was too cloudy. Day just happened. Q lived with his brother then. His brother was already up when Q got home. He, of course, wanted to know where Q had been...

"Bird-watching" was the answer. It was obvious that there had not been a sunrise. That was our first date. There has never been a day since then that we have not seen each other. Except the days when we travel for work.

Q had told me that he was going to marry me. He is a very self-confident person. He is by no means a bully. So, he can say something like "I will marry you" to me on the second date and I would not hold it against him. I would stick around for a third date.

So we kept on seeing each other every day. Dinner, no matter how late. Then he would drop me off and we would call each other as soon as he got home. We both work long hours. We would fall asleep talking to each other on the phone. One time, it was morning before we realized that both had slept all night with the phones open. Time to hang up the phones and go to work. I wonder if this happens to people who date across time lines. Could get expensive. If you are falling asleep talking on the phones it is one of two things: the relationship is a dud, time to hang up. Or, you are trying to eke out every awake second out of each other's company, time to shack up.

Q and I were very happy while we were dating. It was February. Our friends and cousins kept telling us of warm places that they had been. Q and I wanted to go away but I was pretty down in February. It is the month that my father and most-favorite aunt died. It is the longest month of the year. March ended badly last year. A deep friend and first-order cousin was in a coma. A freak thing. One in a million, maybe. One of those things that you go to bed smiling and never wake up from. I knew that she was already dead. Her heart was still beating. We had a first-order aunt who lived dead for over ten (maybe fifteen) years. I did not know how God was going to play this one out. It was February.

Q told me that we were going to Florida for 3 days so I could walk on the beach. And read my books.

Q called the concierge and booked us on a dinner cruise in the Miami bay. He almost killed us getting there, breakneck speed. He was fidgety. I got mad. Okay, we'll get on a big boat, but what is wrong with you? I kept asking him. Is my cousin ok. Why are you fidgeting?

Nothing bad, he kept telling me. He wanted to make sure that I got on a big boat. I had never been on a big boat. Could be fun. It was more than fun. This boat was totally weird. The concierge must have been totally weird. Ukrainian ship, with mostly Soviet crew. Gambling on the lower deck once dinner was over and you were in international waters.

We went up on deck. We were the only people not gambling. We were talking and laughing. It was quiet. Miami twinkled. We were leaning over the railing. I looked up to see Q's face and turned around to look out over the black ocean and at the twinkle of Miami. His hand was stretched out over the railing, with a ring in a box. The box was as black as the water. The ring sparkled like the lights. I'll leave the rest to the imagination. We came back to Miami both knowing that we would spend the rest of our lives together.

     All rights reserved.