Do you want to get married? I mean, to me? Not next year or next month, but now? I would do it, if you wanted to.

It wouldn’t be easy, I’ll be the first to admit it. Neither of my parents would support us, that’s for sure, and I doubt yours would either. One of us would have to quit college and get a job: something fast and temporary. You’d pretend to be willing to do it, but of course I’d end up being the drop out. I’ve never really liked school, anyway, and you would be better at it, besides. Yeah, that’s how it would happen: we would get married and I’d quit school for you, for us, and maybe become a check-out girl or a telemarketer to cover the cost of your tuition. Maybe I’d work in a gas station; the slow minutes ticking by, reading Taoist poetry by the flickering fluorescent light.

We would never have enough money, but I imagine we’d be happy, despite all of the financial trouble. “Thank God for scholarships and student loans,” we would both say in our moments of comparative calm. Of course neither of us would have any real religious beliefs to speak of, not really. Sometimes, though, when you would be working the night shift at the video rental store and I would be home alone, I would feel a sort of holy presence. Not in the way I used to feel God or whatever back in first grade at Catholic school during Thursday mass, but in a vague and misty vibration of something good. Sitting alone at the cracked formica table in our kitchen/living room, I would suddenly and fleetingly feel the undeniable company of a kind and benevolent higher power.

It would not be until years later that I would venture to consider the prospect that perhaps I wasn’t feeling the presence of God at all during those lonely evenings, but was merely happily and unconsciously anticipating the fact that you would be home soon.

Either way, my faith, or lack thereof, would have little (if any) resonance in our relationship. We would rarely argue and would find that we shared many of the same passions. We would both have a strong and unwavering love for advice columns, for instance, and going to the movies, and early afternoons. We would both feel more alive in springtime. In areas with a potential for tension (most notably, taste in music) one of us would usually revert to a state of apathy that quite nicely (albeit temporarily) solved the problem.

You would take special pains to do well in school. Even though I would be reasonably content working for minimum wage at the gas station, you would feel a nearly constant guilt about the fact that I would have given up my education. To be completely honest, I would enjoy the mindless gossip of my coworkers, it would appeal to me infinitely more than the stuffy and reserved conversation of my former peers. Our social life would be severely limited for this very reason. While you, of course, would have friends at the college, I would make it clear that I no longer felt any connection with these “intellectual types.” Often you would accuse me of deliberately trying to isolate myself. I wouldn’t have much to say in my defense. The truth would be that I would never feel isolated (no matter how few friends I had) knowing that I had you.

The summer after your junior year we would spend two and a half months traveling across the country, visiting friends and family. Many of your classmates would have spent time abroad, and we would sometimes jokingly pretend that we were in Europe or Africa when we were really driving down a dusty highway in Kansas or setting up our tent in a rain-soaked campground in Washington. We would bathe in dirty truck stops or (on several occasions) the Pacific Ocean. We would sometimes have to steal food from grocery stores just to eat. And yet, somehow, the whole trip would be almost completely free from anxiety. I would see the Black Hills for the first time, and you would learn how to drive a stick shift. I would finally meet your best friend from the summer camp you attended yearly from kindergarten to high school. He would take us hiking near his rented house in Oregon and, that night, you and I would talk on his back porch swing, falling silent as the stars came out. Weeks later, when we finally returned home, with the chill of the approaching fall barely perceptible in the air, we would be closer than ever: often finishing each others’ sentences or laughing together without either one of us ever having said anything at all.

I would think in the months after we came home that I knew you better than I had ever known anyone in my entire life. When I would tell my dad one day on the phone that I sometimes forgot that you and I were separate people, he would remind me that there is a necessary and inevitable space between God and his people, the sun and the Earth, the nucleus and the electrons. I would tell him that I didn’t think that space existed between you and me. After I hung up the phone, I would wonder, briefly, if I really believed that, or if I just wanted to.

At night I would lie in bed awake and think about pulling away your skin and bone and muscle to find the real you. Underneath all of the tissue I would imagine I would find the part of you that would go out of your way to make me laugh, and the part of you that would hug me so perfectly hard the morning my aunt died. The part of you that would confess a secret love of hay bales one afternoon while driving past endless farmland. The part of you that loved your mother and the neighborhood where you grew up. And the part of you that I would think, as I watched the headlights of the cars on the street outside make patterns on the dark ceiling, loved me.

Every once in while, when you would skip school and I would skip work, we would go fishing in that dirty river that winds behind the local high school. We would catch fish every once in a while, but would more often catch empty beer cans or plastic grocery bags. We would often do irrational or impractical things; stupid things. My favorite times with you, though, would be when we weren’t really doing anything at all. We would sit on the couch together and read our separate books and I would feel almost perfectly happy. I would rest my head on your shoulder and you would put your arm around me. It would be silent except for the rustling of pages and the far-away sound of the television coming up through the floorboards from our neighbor’s apartment downstairs.

We would each take a secret pride in the words husband and wife. I would love the way the ring looked on my finger, even though I would know that it hadn’t been particularly expensive. Marriage would mean something special to us, even though we would never be able to fully articulate what, even to ourselves. In spite of, or maybe because of, that fact, you would make extravagant anniversary plans weeks in advance and our wedding picture would be the only photo that you would keep in your wallet. Your friends would make fun of you for how often you talked about me. They would never understand how much we had come to mean to one another.

Once you graduated, however, things between us would begin to fall apart. First there would be the endless arguments about whether or not you should go to graduate school. I would know that you desperately wanted to go, but would try to pressure you to get a job so that we could “make ends meet” (later, thinking back on that particular fight, I would cringe at the thought of having actually used that phrase). I would have always felt like you were smarter than me, and of course we would both uncomfortably understand that that was the real reason I was so against you getting more schooling. Still, when we found out you were not accepted at Northwestern, I would be both shocked and disappointed. And the change in you after having read that oh-so-concise form letter! It would seem as if your whole life was over at 23. I suppose, if I was pressed to pinpoint the exact moment when our marriage shifted from good to shaky, the moment when you finished reading the rejection letter and then handed it, wordlessly, to me, would have to be it. And to think, other couples stay together through the pressures of raising children, the deaths of family members, disease, or infidelity. All it would take to break us up would be one half-page letter.

Of course it wouldn’t really end at that exact moment. We’d try to make it work for almost two more years. But it would never be the same. You’d get hired as a reference librarian at the branch across town and I’d find a surprisingly decent job with the Bank of America. You’d often complain about being underpaid and overeducated, and I’d only occasionally point out that I had had to give up my entire college education to support us while you studied. The worst day (and maybe this would actually be the end, now that I think of it) would be when I got promoted at work. I would be so excited and happy (a whole two dollar an hour raise!) but you would be miserable to find out that I (degree-less and formerly and most recently employed by Gas-N-Go) had nearly the same salary as you.

I would resent you for being so miserable, and you would resent me for not being miserable enough. You would stop waking up early with me when sun shone in through the bedroom window that faced east, and I wouldn’t kiss you when I came home from work anymore. In January your dad would get sick and you’d go home to visit, but I’d pretend to be too busy at work to come along. When you returned three nights later, you’d tell me that your dad was fine, and that you had never loved me, and that it had all been a mistake. I would cry, and we would decide, the next morning, to get a divorce. Just like that.

The proceedings would be relatively simple, given that neither of us would own much of anything or have any money to speak of. I would get one of my father’s friends to represent me even though he would never have actually passed the bar exam. I would get to keep the apartment but would move into a smaller, less-shitty place (closer to the bank) within a year. I’d initially feel poisoned by the failed marriage, as if my sense of humor was forever lost. But, over time, I’d begin to see the entire thing for what it was: a silly and childish mistake. I would stop regretting it, and stop feeling angry, and would sometimes even miss that particular feeling I used to have when I would wake up in the morning with your arms around me.

I suppose you think it’s crazy, here, now, to plan on a marriage. And, I’ll admit, it’s even crazier to plan on a divorce. But maybe, if you decide to go through with it anyway, if you decide to marry me, you will discover something beautiful and important in our shared insanity. If you embrace whatever there could be between us, whatever potential and possibility exist in this one moment, here, perhaps you will encounter something full of a profound and unknowable significance. Like the weekend two years from now when we will read the entire Roald Dahl Omnibus out loud to each other, or the night next year when neither of us will be able to sleep and we’ll lie in bed and sing all the Elvis Presley songs we can remember, or the time next fall when you’ll pull me into the closet at my grandparent’s house on Thanksgiving and kiss me hurriedly in the musty darkness as my aunt walks down the hall, both of us full of unbroken promises and a radiant hope. Like Tao Ch’ien said: “In these things there is a deep meaning / But when we try to express it, / We suddenly forget the words.”