Remembering

by yummygooey

This photograph just showed up on my Tumblr feed:

That’s my apartment. My table. My Solo Cup fan from the ’11 Sweet Corn Festival. The Wii controllers for the console we never played. The bottle of water that didn’t seem to belong to anyone. Some crappy cupcakes next to some better ones. The purple rose I had sent for her (there was a reason I picked a purple one, but I can no longer recall). The two mini pumpkins I ridiculed her for buying. The espresso maker she had been wanting for at least three months. Oh, and eleven pounds of bacon.

That picture was taken on her birthday.

I remember that week being particularly stressful. I remember a fight the night before her birthday that was never resolved (well, I guess it is now). I remember working on a project until early in the morning and not getting enough sleep. I remember asking her if she was going to come over after class because I was afraid she was still mad at me. I remember it raining all day. I remember skipping my lunch to get her cupcakes, and eating a couple bites of French bread before running off to class. I remember she picked me up on the west side of Everitt Lab with her birthday loot from her mom thrown in her back seat. When we got to my place, I told her to let me out of the car first so I could set up her flower and light the candles on the cupcakes. We made baked eggs with garlic, thyme and gruyere for dinner with some of that ridiculous pile of bacon and some crostini I ended up burning. We went to a The Bling Pig Brewery that night. And that’s about all I remember.

Though we were both busy during that week, I took her out to the restaurant she had been wanting to go to for months that following Sunday evening. It was expensive (enough to cover my semester’s worth of groceries) and it was mediocre at best. There was aioli that tasted like bacon. There was a piece of cheese they gave us that tasted like death and old socks, and made me want to throw up. Quite disgusting. At least her Prosecco was comped.

Some time after that, everything started falling apart.