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“It’s our boy,” Marcus said.

“Har-dee-har-har.” I hopped out of bed, grabbed my T-shirt and shorts.

“Y’all finished up in they-yah?”

You were still unclothed, still on your knee, on the floor. Only the awkward pose didn’t seem funny or fake. Your nakedness made you appear more real, more vulnerable, and more profoundly human than ever.

“Almost,” I croaked.

“So?” Marcus asked.

There was something about this absurdist comedy of a conversation that stirred up my most sentimental longings for us as a couple. Maybe it’s because this was the longest uninterrupted conversation we’d had in months. Despite the fact that there was only one logical answer to this question, I couldn’t say it.

“I think I need to think.” I took off the ring-on-a-string and handed it back to him.

“Just don’t think too much.”

“That’s like telling me not to breathe too much,” I argued.

You sighed as you often do when there’s fresh evidence that I couldn’t find the path to enlightenment even if the Dalai Lama himself planted a GPS device in my (nonexistent) soul.

“Observe emotions objectively as they rise and pass,” you suggested. “Don’t turn away from unpleasant feelings. Be receptive, but not reactive….”

I tried not to roll my eyes at all this meditation talk. None of it has ever made much sense to me. I can’t stop my mind from thinking what it thinks, I can only stop myself from sharing those thoughts with others. Isn’t passing silent judgment a cornerstone of civilized society? This is why I’ve kept my journal private all these years.

(Until now. But you asked for it.)

Another knock from Young Natty. “Hellooooooooo?”

You chewed on the leather to undo the knot that usually rested on the nape of your neck. You removed the ring from the necklace, took my hand, and put it back on the fourth finger of my left hand.

“This always belonged to you.”

“I was just thinking that…”

My voice trailed off, shamed by the memory of me childishly thrusting that ring back in your face.

“‘My thoughts create my world,’” I had seethed. “I’m so tired of being scrutinized through your goddamn third eye!”

That fight, as you know, precipitated your two-year disappearance. During my junior and senior years at Columbia, your contact with me consisted solely of those enigmatic postcards. You started keeping the Death Valley Diaries, of course, only I didn’t know that then.

All that time, you wore the ring, my ring, around your neck. You wore it in my absence, and then after our reunion. You wore it knowing that it would one day return to its intended, when the moment was just right. (I WISH OUR LOVE WAS RIGHT NOW…AND…) The history of the ring lent a sense of preordainment to this spontaneous proposal. Had you planned it? And for how long?

“A week,” you answered as you stepped back into your shorts.

At first I thought you had read my mind again. But then I realized my mistake.

“You’ll be back from your trip in a week.”

“A week.”

I envisioned you mouthing this new mantra over and over as you manned a raft full of eighteen-year-olds downstream.

“Y’all?”

“I’m leaving now!” I said to Natty. And then to you: “I don’t see how your proposal will suddenly make sense seven days from now.”

“Jessica,” you said, taking my face in your abraded hands. “I love you.”

(For you it really is that simple, isn’t it?)

“I would hope so,” I replied, clinging to the humor in all this. “You just asked me to marry you.”

“I’m serious about this.”

“So am I,” I replied. “Which is why I can’t say yes.”

You leaned in and locked eyes. “It’s also why you can’t say no.”

Before I could defend myself, you lowered your lips to suck on my earlobe. My clavicle. My parted lips. Your kisses scrambled my brain. They manipulated the solar system. They returned Marcus Flutie to the center of my universe. I was defenseless against your pre Copernican pull.

“Y’all still in they-ah?”

We parted. I shouldered my bag and opened the door.

“Sho-wah was a play-shure meetin’ ya, Jessica!”

I ignored Young Natty and focused