No Happy Endings

by Nora McInerny Purmort

for dinner. Aaron would never be late. Minus ten points. Matthew arrived, twelve minutes late* and completely soaked. Last year, I’d given Aaron a piggyback over a snowbank to our favorite diner for what we didn’t know would be his last meal out. This year, it was pouring rain. Stop. I told myself. Be here. The first year of widowhood is a year of firsts: 365 days where you can say “last year, we were . . .” The blank is filled in with everything from the monumental to the mundane: we were at the oncologist for an MRI, we were picking apples at the orchard and pretending he wasn’t dying, we were looking at the price of flights to Arizona for a Christmas he would never celebrate. It’s an entire calendar year of emotional landmines, every single day loaded with meaning. I’d wanted to propose a different day for our first date, but which one? If every day was reserved for living in my past, when would I have time for the present? Two hours after Matthew finally arrived, our dinner was over and the staff at Pizza Nea was ready to go home. Around the time our appetizers arrived, I’d stopped cataloging the differences between Matthew and Aaron, and slipped into the present moment. It was not an intentional shift; it was an imperceptible magnetic pull into the present moment, probably emanating from Matthew’s unbelievably blue eyes. They were crinkled at the edges, and lined with jet black lashes that only men are born with because the world is unfair.