The space between takeoff and landing

I was mid-air, somewhere over Louisiana, when I felt a tap on my shoulder that may have changed my life.

Disrupting the unspoken agreement airplane passengers make to each other -- to not acknowledge each other’s existence -- the old man introduced himself in a thick drawl. “Hi there, I’m Bill,” he said, grinning, hand outstretched. The audacity.

“Where ya comin’ from?” he grinned.

“New Orleans,” I replied.

“New Or-le-ans,” he said in four syllables. “Well, now that’s a fun town.”

I feigned nonchalance. I’d spent the weekend with a girlfriend, trying to quell the anxiety that threatened to derail the first relationship I’d ever had that made me nervous -- a relationship I’d let linger between friendship and for-real for almost a year now. And in an hour and 20 minutes, I would land right back in limbo.

I smiled and nodded as Bill prattled on. Inside I was in knots, hating myself for not knowing for sure what to do with this big question mark that waited for me back home. Wishing someone would just tell me what to do.

Chris coming into my life was like winning a dream trip when you’d already burned through your vacation days. He was exactly the kind of person I wanted, but at what seemed like the worst possible time.

Still wincing from a failed engagement to a guy that was supposed to be the antidote to the guy I almost married just two years before that, romance was the last thing on my mind when I met Chris on that random weeknight. It was the night before my 28th birthday. While all my friends were at home with their husbands and babies, I was out at a bar, making small talk with people I wasn’t interested in -- pretending to have fun, pretending to be normal, pretending I wasn’t overwhelmed with the self-loathing grief that comes after you reject the life you thought you wanted... ​twice​.

And all of a sudden there was Chris, grinning and bouncing around the room with such happy, easy confidence. He made me laugh -- a real laugh. We got to talking about music, and about travel. He was confident. Adventurous. Naturally happy. “We’re going to be best friends,” I said, dumping cold water on any romantic overtures as he asked for my number. He started texting me the next day.

By the following weekend, we’d already bought tickets to two concerts together. “Best friends,” I reminded him. How easy it seemed. We could talk about everything, or nothing. Just being around this guy I barely knew, I felt more like myself than I had in years. No pressure. No drama. The fog around me started to lift. We started seeing each other every weekend.

One night, walking my dog around my apartment complex after dinner, he stopped and kissed me. “You’re not ready for this,” the voice in my head told me. But what if I was? “It can’t be this easy,” the voice reasoned. But what if it was? “You’ll only hurt him, too,” the voice insisted. So I said goodnight and tried to forget it.

Instead of dating Chris, I dated strangers I didn’t like. He was dating other people, too. And yet we still texted every day, still hung out every weekend, and we still wound up kissing at the door of my apartment when he’d walk me home -- never talking about it the next day. It must have been maddening for him, but he never pushed me.

My friends prodded me. My parents wondered. But I held to my familiar refrain: “We’re just friends.”

Until one night, at an outdoor concert, I looked over at him and something made me say: “Let’s go for it.” And we did. For two months. And it was everything I thought it would be -- easy, fun, happy. I remember waking up one morning at his house, looking over at him, feeling overwhelmingly happy but fighting a nagging thought: “What’s the catch?”

Christmas came, and he gave me a card that said “To new adventures!” As he stood there smiling, a wave of dread rushed over me. I knew what would happen next. Next he would call himself my boyfriend. Next he would meet my family. Next we would move in together. Next he would propose. I thought of the never-worn wedding dress hanging in my closet, reminding me that I had failed.

I broke up with him abruptly and started dating the next guy who crossed my path: an old friend from high school who was nice but didn’t make me laugh. The newness of it kept me distracted for about three weeks.

Finally I came to my senses. I started texting Chris constantly -- not bothering with any guise of mystique. I showed up at his house unannounced, barging in, listing all the reasons we should be together and daring him to disagree. I caught him trying not to smile.

He kept me at arm’s length until Valentine’s Day, when I woke up to a text message with an emoji bouquet of flowers. We soon found ourselves back in the same tenuous non-friendship that drove him crazy. While I couldn't stand the thought of being without him, I was terrified to commit. I let our relationship hang in the balance, but I knew we couldn’t go on like this forever.

Bill was still talking. Something about his kids. Something about his wife. He caught my attention.

“Her name is Zeda,” he said. “I call her Z.” She wasn’t with him, couldn't travel anymore. “Alzheimer’s,” he said. “But, see, we have this list of places to go and things to see, and I promised her we’d do it. And, well, I’ve never broken a promise to her...”

They met almost 50 years ago. Bill worked in insurance, settling injury cases for large organizations. One of his clients was an amusement park in Georgia, where Z worked as a nurse. “She was a beautiful woman, and she was smart,” he said. He was drawn to her right away. For their first date, he took her to the park’s cafeteria and joked about the possibility of falling in love over pre-cut watermelon. But Z had been married before, and she was raising her daughter alone. She was guarded, skeptical.

Bill wasn’t deterred.

He made her laugh. He told her about books he’d read and places he wanted to travel. He saved up money and took her to a fancy restaurant. He gave her the time she needed to warm up to him. And then, while watching TV one night, he leaned over and asked her to marry him. The question caught her off guard. She told him she’d think about it.

And she did.

And they married in the spring.

A year later they had a daughter. Then a son. Then started traveling the world. He bought her fur coats, even though they lived in Florida, so she would feel like royalty. He had a pinky ring made for her that spelled “Z” in diamonds. He let her talk him into dance lessons.

“Wait,” I interrupted. “But how did you know she was the one? How could you be sure?”

Bill started laughing. “Sure? Well, nobody’s sure. I just asked myself, ‘Do I want to wake up every day and see this same face?’ I figured, that’s a good enough indication.”

I smirked. “That’s all there is to it, huh?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “And then you figure out all the rest..."

“Such as?”

“The first thing is, just have fun with each other doing normal, boring stuff.”

I thought about brushing my teeth next to Chris, flashing him a dumb, sudsy smile.

“Then, you have communicate.”

I thought about our endless stream of text messages, full of gifs and jokes and plans and all the little check-ins that marked time around my daily routines. The emoji flowers.

“Of course you have to trust the person. You can’t ever become jealous or suspicious of one another.”

I thought about that time I’d crossed paths with my ex and how much it had rattled me. I’d pulled myself together and gone to brunch with our friends, none of whom could see that I was crumbling inside. But Chris knew, and he took me to the movies to see some dumb comedy. He didn’t say a word, just put his arm around me and let me cry on his shoulder while the rest of the theater roared with laughter.

“You have to love each other exactly as you are. You can’t try to change the person. You have to be able to be yourselves.”

I thought about how Chris didn’t run away when I told him about my mistakes. He didn’t punish me for pushing him away. He made me comfortable enough to show him the good, the bad, and the weird parts of myself. He didn’t mind my fleeting obsessions with eastern religion, gardening, Game of Thrones novels. He tiptoed around my apartment when I was on my daily meditation kick. He told me I was beautiful when I wore my thick, nerdy glasses. He didn’t share my love of Michael Jackson, but he still bought me a special edition of ​Thriller​ on vinyl and a record player.

Maybe all this time, this big, insurmountable question of, “Is he the one?” had already been answered. In a million little ways, it was already decided. Maybe it really was as simple as Bill made it out to be. Maybe the pressure of perfection -- the billboards of expectations that hang all over social media -- had clouded something that by nature isn’t supposed to be all that complicated.

Fun. Communication. Trust. Respect.

“And one more thing,” Bill said. “Never break a promise.”

He said the last one with emphasis. It’d been five years since Z’s Alzheimer's diagnosis. They’d promised “for better or for worse,” and Bill wasn’t going to break that promise. Even if “worse” meant living a life they’d planned together alone, while she forgot his name.

I asked myself if Chris would do the same for me. I thought about how I must have tormented him, getting close and then pulling away, only to erratically snap back with lucidity. And he was still here.

“Well, what about you?” Bill asked. “Married? Boyfriend?”

In the anonymous space of 30,000 feet, I found myself gushing to this stranger about the first relationship that felt like it could be ​it​. I told him about all the little ways Chris made me laugh. The way he always seemed happy, and never worried. How much I respected him. How it was equal parts exciting and safe.

“It reminds me of you and Z, actually,” I said. Bill nodded.

It struck me: Of all the thousands of people coming in and out of the airport that day, on thousands of flights to countless destinations -- Bill and I found ourselves improbably seated next to each other. ​Both of us struggling to come to terms with relationships stuck in the balance. He was preparing for landing. I was working up the courage to take off.

“Do you like waking up next to him in the morning?” Bill asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

“You tell that boy that he better get with the program and marry you.” I smiled. The fasten-seatbelt light came on with a ding.

“Look at that,” Bill said. “Almost home.”