Staying with You

J-Man and I went to a wedding last weekend.

First, I love weddings.  I really, really do.  They make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.  They make me squeeze J-Man's leg, right above the knee-bone, and smile at him.  They make me trace an I and a heart and a U on his thigh and wait for him to look at me and say "on the west side?" They make me think about how every couple has inside jokes like that and how love is so universal and yet so unique between individual people. 

Weddings make me wear heels, which make me hold tight to J-Man's elbow while he escorts me places.  They make me dance the Cupid Shuffle and forget about how Papa H and Big Sis tease me for having missed out on the all-important black dancing gene, whenever I try the electric slide.

Weddings make me wrap my arms around J-Man's neck and sway to the cheesy love songs and let everything else fade away

This wedding was a little tougher, what with it starting 45 minutes late and including a cocktail hour in which we could only look at, but not partake of, the cocktails and sodas displayed.  That, and the lack of appetizers or bread, enough to make me want to fake diabetes just to get some crackers.  J-Man and I did slip into the exhibits to look at sniper rifles and tanks and replicas of 'winter on the front,' which, had we come to the National Museum of the Marine Corps for any other reason, would have been fascinating. 

Still, as the bride and groom entered as husband and wife to the beat of Nicki Minaj Moment 4 Life and immediately transitioned into the tune of Randy Travis Forever and Ever Amen for the first dance, I could feel it.

I remembered J-Man's and my song - Stay with You.  I used to sing the lyrics to him in my not so melodical voice, both before and after our big day.  It's been accepted that I love our song more than he does, but he loves it because I love it, and I love it because of the memories it jogs.

The first time I heard it I was on the 4 train heading home from classes at Lehman.  I was exhausted from another day in the life of a NYC teacher and further frustrated by spending a night at an institution determined to make everything more difficult for the teachers trying our best to serve our own students.  I had at least an hour of lesson planning ahead of me, crazy subway folks all around me, and I was on one of the grimy, old-school trains, with the orange and yellow seats.  I remember that my playlist was on random and I arrived at a song from an entire album brother-in-law had let me borrow.  I must've heard the song before, but maybe I'd just never listened?

I heard the words

Though relationships can get old
They have the tendency to grow cold
We have something like a miracle
Yeah, and I'll stay with you

and I thought, you know what, this is a miracle.  My J-Man is my own private miracle. 

I don't know how many times I replayed that song through the spring and summer leading up to the big day.  And goodness knows how many times afterward, 3000 miles from home, from where we first met, from where the entirety of my life had been lived.  I'd turn it on when I would clean our Washington state apartment and think "how did I get all the way out here?" 

Now we're back, and we're making friends in our new east coast life.  We're facing struggles in the "miracle" department in other ways.  But every time I see a first dance, no matter how crazy the rest of the wedding might be, I'll always kiss my J-Man's shaved cheek and remind him I want to stay with him.