Nic Narrates

Keeping Faith

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

For him, I always seem to make that leap of faith.

But that leap keeps getting a bit farther away. Or maybe I’m just getting older. Or wiser, is it?

Tonight, I went digging for something now forgotten through a stack of unopened mail, birthday cards, and flyers for the Joffrey…your typical run-of-the-mill junk on the edge of your kitchen table…and ran across an oldish photograph. Somehow, this picture (one of our very first as a couple) ended up tucked into an envelope with a few favorite family photos from over the years.

It was a photo of us at a friend’s wedding (of course). In it, he looks younger, thinner, and a bit drunk. Handsome in a breathless-inducing way. Still. And I… I look naïve and heavier, with a great deal of unruly hair and far too much eyeliner.

Studying our faces, I remember how oppressively hot the church was that August evening, how we suffered through the overcrowded reception. We barely knew each other. He was 36, divorced, and a father of one. I was in grad school, working as an intern, and had only just turned 23.

It’s one of the few photos we took during our first summer together. One of the handful that have survived all that came after. And, for me, it is one of five or so that I can look at without thinking about “her” or “what he said” or “where I failed.”

And yet, here is this piece of our mutual history. Here is this forgotten record of who we were before. And I kept it. It may be that which strikes me the most about the photo; that through all of it, I chose to keep it. I don’t remember having done so, haven’t thought of it since as “missing,” but must have felt it worth keeping. And I’m glad for that.

Glancing at it again, I catch myself shaking my head at the clueless couple caught in time. Five years before all that would follow. So many tears, so much turmoil. So many moments of connection, laughter, and hope. So much life between us.

I wonder though, if given the chance, we’d make the same decisions. If we’d arrive at the same outcomes. If we’d continue to make this same leap of faith together.