It all came down to a ham sandwich.
My mother met Brody Valk at work while eating a ham sandwich instead of going out for lunch like she usually did.
She passed her enthusiasm for the 22-year-old, all-american, Christian, home owner Brody to me. I was charmed by his put-together-ness despite the fact that he, like I, had just gotten out of a rather long term relationship with someone he thought he would marry. I was 19. Brody was 22.
We wrote letters through email back and forth for weeks.
There is something to the act of written correspondence.
We saw a movie together and did the whole my-hand-goes-where awkward dance. The kiss goodnight lasted 17 minutes and in the days to come things lurched onward in intensity.
Phone calls were placed two and three hours in length. We discussed music, young adult-hood, and eventually picket fences, dogs, and 2.5 children. We breathed heavy sighs which we quickly caught when discussing what might occur should we ever meet at night in a bedroom. I remember feeling timid, and waiting for cues in order to say what I really felt. I remember pressing my cheeck into the scalding hot cell phone. It had been on a charger since it had run out of battery life forty minutes before.
The feelings were like tidal waves of loveliness that seemed unshakeable, unmovable, incorruptible.
But I was wrong.
In October I had a speech tournament to go to at Middle Tennessee State. Murfreesboro, home of MTSU, was a mere 10 miles east of where Brody owned his shoebox home.
On the phone that morning, he asked if I wanted any specific kind of cereal. It was understood that I would stay the night, the beautiful night, and come home on Sunday. I asked for Fruity Pebbles.
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