April 13th, 2029

Eros,

This can't really be happening to me, you know? It can't. This kind of connection, this kind of love, well it's not really possible. This shit is storybook. I live in the real world. But here I am in the clouds, me and Liam together, and I can't believe this is happening to me.

We've only been dating for a short time. He told me he loved me. And today, Eros, he asked me to marry him. For a while he's been leaving me hanging on these silly quips, like "Let me take you to Vegas and convince you to marry me" or something like that. A few days ago he even went so far as to make it a suggestion "One day, when I buck up the courage enough to actually ask you, I'm going to take you away and marry you". My brain, I think, can't handle these things. No, it definitely cannot. I couldn't even register that this might be something he was serious about. I still can't register that he really, truly asked. Playful banter. Thats all I could ever let my brain think any of those silly quips were. The first time he mentioned marriage I ignored it. I couldn't think of an adequate response to a suggestion that to me seemed like a joke. The subsequent times he mentioned it I failed at making a joke back at him because well, maybe he wasn't joking. Finally I told him "We can talk about that when I get to the bottom of you". Liam is mysterious, but hes no longer a mystery to me. I've been digging at him to tell me more of his past and experiences. He's been reluctant. Rightfully so. He took me through his old boarding school two days ago. He told me all about his life as a child there. He was tortured in school. Up until the time he was an 18 year old boy at that school, he was picked on, bullied, and brutally tortured in the locker rooms by the evil boys he boarded with. Princeton kids, I guess, will be that way. When we got to the end of the tour he broke down. Crying. I hate when men cry. It skeeves me out. But I was there for him, consoling and understanding, able to let go of the skeevy feeling and in order to let myself feel compassion and only compassion while he told me how his headmaster raped him. Bye bye mystery. I know him, now, all his life and experiences and now all of his trials, and the biggest most painful part of himself he has chosen to share with me. So I know him. Even just in the act of choosing me, I learned more about him and about how he and I fit than I ever knew before. Until then all those marriage proposals were just silly quips. He said them, again and again, and I put a mental blockade up to prevent myself from thinking "Oh hey, he might be serious". So I kept on thinking "Nah, he's not serious". But I think he's serious. And now I can be serious, too.

Liam and I, we work. We want the same things. To travel, to live, to be a bunch of bohemian yuppies in the city before moving back down the shore and living a life of seasonal beaching among the modest middle class of New Jersey. Maybe a dog. Never kids. We both shiver at the word infant. Ughhhh. We talked about it early on. Marriage is a joke. Who needs a document to declare that love is true? Only people who are too afraid that it isn't. A bond to unify you to a person in order to stamp them with yourself just to prove to yourself that they won't leave you. Its fear, marriage. Marriage seemed like such a fabrication, a blanket woven to cover up the fear that you'll lose the one part of yourself that you need. We knew that we agreed on that way back in January. But here we are. I've been thinking about Liam since he brought up Vegas for the first time, about if that was even a feasible option, and suddenly marriage seems very different to me.

He asked me to marry him today. He went through with the whole down on one knee traditional Will you marry me? ceremony. We're not doing rings. Tattoos. We're Motley Crue fans. So I said yes. And in August when we can both have off from work, we're leaving for Vegas. No one will know about it. Its a big fucking secret, which I think is kind of fun, until our families find out and murder us both, but whatever. Who cares? I can't believe that any of this is happening. Come August, though, I'll know for sure.

-Lynn