Twenty Something

I am quite skeptical about anything that carries a sense of permanence.

Few years ago, I remember seeing an Instagram post about a Japanese man who married his wife in 1956. Unfortunately, she lost her sight due to complications from diabetes when she was 52. Many years later, after they had finally settled down from a lifetime of traveling side by side, he spent two whole years planting shibazakura flowers, what we call moss phlox, just so she could smell them. All of that, simply to make her happy.

So I went on the internet to search about this story.

It can’t be true.

There were so many things about that story that made me raise my eyebrows. It was not only the fact that they had been married for so many decades, but that even after countless years, when legs grow sore and backs begin to ache, he still went out of his way so she could “witness” the blossoms through their fragrance.

I scrolled to the end of the post. There was a photo of them sitting together in front of a sea of shibazakura, his thin arm wrapped gently around her tiny shoulder. The way she smiled reminded me of a childhood photo my grandfather once took of me playing in the snow with my grandmother when I was three. It was the purest kind of joy. And her husband was smiling even brighter.

I realized I had started smiling too. And that surprised me, because it was not only skepticism I carried about two people holding on to promises and walking through a lifetime of permanence. I had always despised the very idea of it.

Yet today, I find myself smiling in front of a boy when he casually takes the tomato out of his chicken sandwich and places it into mine. When he mixes the spicy buffalo sauce with ranch at McDonald’s for our fries, and if that sounds gross to you, please try it and come back to thank me. When he orders my drink with extra ice anywhere we go. When he suddenly pulls out the hairbrush I was just struggling to find and brushes my bangs. When every shared soda at the movies somehow becomes Diet Coke.

And when he looks at me, he is smiling even brighter too.

Am I still skeptical about permanence in life? Maybe. But, maybe not.