Knowing Everything I Knew, I Would Still Choose Bride

Even now, knowing how the story ends, it would still be her that I chose, EVERY SINGLE TIME!  The older we got, the more we knew life wasn’t about choosing someone once.  Love for us was about choosing each other again, and again and again.  Anyone can choose someone when they’re dating.  The real choosing starts after the puppy love, when we have seen each other tired, stubborn, scared shitless, imperfect, hurt, frustrated, grieving, aging, and just the unvarnished humans we were.  The funny thing is that the more I learned about Bride, the easier the choosing got. 

I got to thinking about this after listening to a song sung by Chris Stapleton and P!nk called “I will choose you a thousand times”.   I felt like during Bride and my time together this song could have been one of our anthems.   When we started seeing each other we were convinced this was nothing more than a fling.  We agreed that we would just be fuck buddies, her term, until we stopped having fun, and we never did.  When she got out of the Navy, she was going back to Texas, and that was that.  I learned much later that in the beginning she was afraid of us.  She had had her heart broken and she was afraid I would end up with the power to do that to her, and she did not want anyone to have that again, ever again.

We had our share of pain over the years.  We buried parents, and friends.  We worried about money at times.  We bickered about things that felt important in the moment but turned out to be ridiculously stupid minutes later.  We celebrated victories, banged through the potholes of life as we watched each other become more fully ourselves than the ones who started that “fling” all those years ago.  Through all of that journey, neither of us woke up one day and decided to stop choosing.   We used to joke that no one else would have either one of us, so it had to be us.    

The longer we were together, the less effort either of us spent putting up the façade we thought the other one wanted, or needed.  The filters went away.  The rough edges were exposed, like the opposite of how sanding a big ass chunk of walnut works.  The habits became the rhythm of our lives, and that included all the quirky, idiosyncratic nonsense we both carried.  Along the way, I stopped falling in love with the version of Bride I met, and simply fell in love with her, all of her. 

One of the things I learned was that Bride didn’t need saving from any of it.  She was more than capable of taking care of herself, and usually that is how that worked.  She was strong, courageous, independent, and stubborn as hell when she needed to be, and absolutely certain when she thought she was right, even if she wasn’t.  The funny thing was that the longer I knew her, the more those things became the very reason I chose her instead of reasons not to.

That stubborn bit, I bumped into that just a bit before she passed.  It had been a while, so it surprised me.  We had talked about putting a pool in our back yard, to the point of setting aside some cash to do it.  When the quotes came in and plans were sketched out, I started getting cold feet.  She wanted a pool back there.  I talked about the investment never being recouped, as is the way with pools, I talked about the economy, the length of time we might live here and how long we would use it.  All the logical things to think about, she didn’t care.

At the end of our last discussion, we were both exasperated and were probably talking past each other.  I went downstairs for a bit and when I came up, she was nowhere to be found.  We have an app on our iPad that tracks the locations of our phones.  I had never used it before and just tried calling her, but there was no answer each time.  I texted her and finally she texted back, she had gotten a hotel room and was going to stay there that night. I called until she answered, and she had the Terri Clark song, “I just wanna be mad” song playing in the background.  She was mad for a while, then I went up and we talked and then laughed and then came home.  We paid for a hotel room she was in for less than an hour. 

Looking back on that night now, it makes me smile.  Today what I remember most about that night, that right thar was Bride being Bride.  Determined, stubborn, certain and unwilling to back down when she believed in something.  It is silly little things like that that made choosing her so freaking easy.    

We always remembered that in situations like that, it was not me against her, or her against me.  It was us against the problem.  Some days we were better at remembering that than others.  But each and every time, one of us would play the “I just wanna be mad” card for the other one.  The goal was never to win an argument.  The goal, above all else, was preserving our relationship, making it easy to keep on choosing the other one.

Looking back now, I think one of the things I loved the most about Bride was that she never really became someone different.  She simply became more authentically herself over the years.  The directness that felt abrupt at the beginning became one of the things I admired most about her, the zero bullshit game was strong with this one.  The funny thing is that the things that surprised me about Bride in the beginning eventually became the things I treasured most.  Her stubborn streak, her orneriness, and her zero bullshit approach to life, that is what made the choosing easy.

Even now, knowing everything I know, the joy, the pain, the victories, the losses and yes even knowing how the story ends. 

It would still be her.

EVERY SINGLE TIME.