Bathroom Monologue: Twenty Years

They were the high school sweethearts who didn’t know they were in love. They ran the school blog, spending long nights figuring out HTML and never so much as touching each other’s hands. They were each other’s default guest at parties.

They were running jokes for all their friends, through college and into work places. No one spent that long on the phone with somebody they weren’t screwing – except they weren’t. They were starting up a company that was going to revolutionize non-invasive ads, a topic that was only exciting for the two of them, and an excitement that everyone else understood differently from the two of them.

Too broke to buy houses, they pitched in for rent on one apartment from which to launch their venture. They did each other’s laundry, drove each other home from surgery, and patiently faced down accusations from each other’s parents about the location of sin and their proximity to living in it.

It was almost twenty years before a college intern shoved one of them on New Years Eve and demanded they kiss. And they might have been drunk, and they might have been hiding things, but they did and it lasted an eternal seven seconds – they both knew because it made them so nervous they couldn’t focus on anything but their watches.

Then they were quiet.

Then one of them said, “We should do that more often.”

So they did. They spent another twenty years together starting the next morning, and another twenty after that.