Tuesday

I'm sharing rides with the wife now.

That sounds negative, but it's really not.  She's also, technically, my fiance, but at this point--diamond firmly affixed to her hand--she's not going anywhere and neither am I.  "Wife" works.

The train--my wonderful train that I spoke so highly of--is still snaking its way along the highway and up the river, just without me in it.  The "wife" works in the same area I do now, so we're sharing rides and testing our tolerance of one another during the most difficult times of the day. 

We've done well so far.  She knows when I don't feel like talking, and would rather listen to Howard Stern (who she once hated, but has become a fan).  On the days we do feel like talking, it helps add a different element to the autopilot setting my mind descends into now that I'm weaving through those same familiar roads. 

At first, the drive was actually kind of fun again.  As we passed by those houses that I had come to loathe so much, I became a sort of movie studio tour guide.  "Up here on the right, this place has a great wrap-around porch."  "That place goes nuts at Christmas."  "This is the largest house in the town and has real flames in lanterns at the entrance that never go out."  She was mesmerised by them, and in a way, I came to appreciate them again, through her eyes.

As I'd expected, though, the highlight reel ran thin eventually, and as the monotony of the trip set in, the properties that once elicited an "oooohhh" wouldn't receive a passing glance from her.  She was messing around on her phone, I was listening to the radio, and the scenery bending around us became, once again, a meaningless blur.

Thankfully, for the most part, we have an unspoken understanding that while we must live this trip everyday, we don't have to pretend to like it, and we can share in our jaded, flippant attitude towards what most outsiders would choose to gawk at, but that we couldn't care less about.

The other day, a woman in a very expensive Porsche she had no business driving attempted to execute a basic turn into her driveway in such a way that she mimicked what a domestic house cat dosed with LSD would have looked like if it was trying to walk through a doorway without hitting the sides.  Before I could part my lips, my "wife" simply looked up from her phone and said, "What a shit-head.  And fuck her for living in that house."  There was no anger in the tone of her voice--it was just very matter of fact.

In that moment, I knew that I picked the right one to marry.