Love Story, Rewritten

By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison

Once upon a time there was a girl with flaxen hair and laughing eyes who could be anything she wanted. (That’s what they told her.) For many years she happily skipped away from the question of what exactly that would be. After all, she was enjoying her childhood. But finally, in the seventh grade (with terrible hair and searching eyes) she was required to decide her career for an English project, and so she set off on a quest into the fledgling Internet to find what future would make her the absolute most money. (Because, as everyone knows, the best adventures require a lot of money, and she wanted a life of adventure.) 

It was decided and laboriously typed into print. The girl who could be anything at all wanted to be—an ophthalmologist. 

In those early years, when the world was filling her head with great possibilities and loading impossible expectations onto her back, her father was saying a quiet prayer. The prayer was: Dear God, protect the man she is going to marry. Let him love You first. Let him love her always. 

Well, that was funny because eventually, when the bad haircut became a bad memory, the girl found herself surrounded by young men, some of whom were interesting and others of whom were interested in her. She thought about men and the adventures she still very much wanted to have as she sat in her red-brick tower surrounded by rows of corn. Chin in hand, she would gaze out, seeing no sign of civilization for hours at a time and sometimes wondering if her Left Behind books had come true—if the apocalypse had indeed happened. Shaking off the thought, she chose instead to imagine that the man she would marry was far, far away. She would find him on one of her many trips around the world as an award-winning humanitarian journalist (a newly discovered, more efficient route to adventure.) He probably spoke several languages, he probably had never seen corn in his life, he probably - right now - was somewhere far, far away planning his own marvelous future. 

Gathering up every ounce of her seventeen years of conviction, she said a prayer: Dear God, I promise not to date any guy exclusively. (The angels gasped at the sacrifice.) I promise I won’t tie myself down to anyone at all until I meet … The One. Amen. And to seal in her dedication to the task, she went to youth group that evening, out of sheer devotion to God. 

God, meanwhile, was laughing.

She arrived early, earnest and excited to celebrate her covenant with some Third Day songs. Breezing into the sanctuary, she stopped short. She couldn’t believe it, but there he was, right in front of her, right that moment: The One. Not across the world learning a third language and filling his passport with stamps, but here, in the middle of what was practically the same cornfield. The late summer sun streamed through the windows and motes of dust hung suspended in the air as she followed the worn red carpet to the front of the church, unable to take her eyes off the boy in the white tee shirt with the electric guitar. 

“Ummm… hey, Adrie,” he said, when he noticed her standing there staring. 

Yes, he knew her. After all, he was one of the boys she had recently pledged to date non-exclusively so as not to accidentally deflect Mr. Right when he came along. She hadn’t realized she might find him before her adventure even started. None of the love stories she had read seemed to go that way, but apparently hers would. 

They went to Applebees together. They went to prom together. And finally, they went to college together. When she was just eighteen, they were already talking of marriage. Her primary concern was how quickly, after the nuptials, they could become Dr. and Dr. Garrison, or, if it suited the sender, The Drs. Garrison. Since it was no longer practical to travel the world fighting injustice, she settled for becoming a clinical psychologist. After all, she loved stories, so maybe she could just listen to other people’s for a living. The young lovers lined up their lives in semesters and grad school applications and eventually set off on an adventure to a thrillingly large city (that was still in the middle of cornfields.) 

A few things got lost along the way. The whole therapist plan fell apart during a required semester of research, when she realized that people could be reduced to numbers on a bell curve, and that their stories could be fitted into categories, diagnosed, treated, and quickly forgotten. If she couldn’t listen to stories all day, she thought perhaps she could read them aloud (with silly voices, even!), and so she became a teacher. This was a better fit anyway, with the path he had chosen. Medical school would lead to residency and residency would lead to: anywhere at all. She needed a job that could follow her as she followed him. 

In those first ten years of their love story, following his dream seemed to be the primary plot line. She woke up to it slowly, resistantly. This is the adventure I wanted, she told herself. But another narrative crept in, when his gaze was fixed to textbooks and his nights were bound to the hospital. When his match in  emergency medicine pulled her across the country, away from her dream job and every person she knew and loved, doubt crept in. What if? 

What if she had chosen a man who had chosen his job? What if this wasn’t an adventure at all, but an assembly line?

There were many fights in those days, and so much heartache. At the appointed time in his medical career, a baby came, and she held fast to a shred of a hope: that once they were free from these twelve years of training they would finally begin their adventure. Against all odds, when the choice was finally theirs to make and they could go anywhere in the country to begin their unindentured lives they went—back to the cornfields. (Grandparents, after all, are an immeasurable treasure.)

She didn’t return to the classroom after the baby, but continued to read boatloads of stories aloud and even, in the still-dark hours of the morning, to write some. Their lives continued to revolve around his schedule, and also, of course, the first baby’s schedule, and then the second baby’s schedule. It was a different kind of adventure, sure, but she made the best of it. When his shifts brought never-ending strings of loneliness that even the children couldn’t break, she found herself, chin in hand, gazing out the window of her new stone tower at rows of other people’s houses, wondering at how she had managed to get so grown up without nearly as much excitement as she’d planned. 

The world tipped over in a series of strange months, and her husband, who had all along had been working to stem the tide of disease and injury, to put people back together again, was suddenly face-to-face with a problem he couldn’t solve: a global pandemic. 

If you’re feeling sorry for him, remember to feel sorry for the girl who was now a grown woman! After all, this pandemic was the absolute enemy of adventure. Flights were cancelled, plans put on hold, festivals forgotten, and all of the people were shut into their houses. It was her worst nightmare! Left Behind, only they still cared about toilet paper.

He went to work, and she stayed home. He went to work, and she skipped rocks in the creek with the children. He went to work, and she spun new stories. He went to work, she went to therapy. Day after day, month after month, he put on his scrubs and walked into mayhem. Like the boy with his finger in the leaking dyke, the numbers—who were always, actually, people—threatened to overwhelm him, but he never gave up. 

It was sometime in the nineteenth month. It was sometime during the time of delta, that the lie she had been carrying about their love story punctured. The air went out of it. The belief that she’d somehow missed out on an adventure of her own, that she’d chosen a man who had chosen his job—these fallacies went still and lifeless in her hands. She realized, in the same sudden and nonsensical way she had fallen in love with him in the first place, that she had been wrong. She’d been wrong about dreams and grand adventures, she’d been wrong about love and about him. She’d been wrong about the thing she believed she most wanted. One regular day, when her husband came home with weariness in his eyes and welts on his skin from his N95 mask, when he sat on the couch with a child tucked under each arm, hair still wet from the shower, and read them story after story after story, she finally saw it all clearly. 

What she actually wanted was a man who loved God first, and loved her always. What she wanted was a life that pressed all the way through the hard to get to the beautiful. What she wanted, dear reader, was this. Exactly, precisely this. 

It wasn’t the love story she had imagined, but it was hers. And she lived it (most days even happily) ever after.