I WAS A FEW MONTHS INTO MY JOB at the registrar’s office, which operated out of a defunct fraternity house on the edge of campus. Mine was just one in a line of dorm rooms, complete with a built-in floor-to-ceiling bureau and a mirror beside the door. There were showers. And an oven I used once, peeking into the kitchen every so often to make sure it was still working. A few colleagues joked that the building was condemned, and I liked that. Not because I had anything against the building. Only my colleagues had endured the hard seasons of humidity and chill, or a moth under the toilet seat. And not because I enjoyed thinking in terms of good and evil. But the word seemed to tear the building down prematurely—in the mind—and once it had been torn down in the mind, we seemed to operate in only the spirit of the building. The hallways only hallways in essence. The work, a kind of metaphysical work.
Margaret and I arranged bouquets to brighten temporary rooms. Plastic flowers. Adjusting the angle of a vase, I told her about the glass flower museum in Cambridge, occasioned by the artist’s wish to keep flowers forever. But also how that idea never fully made sense to me. Wasn’t glass brittle—just as fragile as real flowers? If they wanted forever, why not mint them in plastic, like these pliable dollar store carnations?
Margaret went silent a while, then leaned in to whisper, My neighbors wonder how my roses bloom through winter.
There are doors.
There are countries, rolling prairies.
Sometimes there is a door in the middle of a country, connecting one side of a prairie to the rest of it. Those are sacraments.
In Boston, for instance, there was Allston Christmas. The August exodus, when thousands of students moved out of their dingy apartments all at once, making room for next year’s crop, abandoning piles of free goods curbside for rummaging. Amid damaged antique furniture and packages of mousetraps, I found a general beauty greater than any single article. Lives left out in the sun to meld with other lives.
In Nebraska, sacraments seem more ubiquitous yet harder to piece apart. Frost entombs hundred-foot cottonwoods, up to their million skyward sprouts. In the summers, gnats hover over acres of prairie, ungraspable and warbling like frenzied stars about to burst. White-tailed deer the size of cars bound into tree lines. Sandhill cranes sew the sky in their migrations, leaving only wisps of feathers in the dirt. And the great blue heron. Appearing like a spirit now and then, its broad wings filling like sails, willing itself out of every photograph.
You were with me in Boston and Nebraska. Chicago, Copenhagen, Cochem, Berlin. You were with me in South Dakota, New Mexico, and Illinois. The sky barreled, and we sang walking over frozen earth. Sacrament. The sea ripped under our tonnage in the blinking red light, and the castle in mist. Sacrament. The blue canyon, desert rain, and the tin roof of stars, all sacraments. We drank juice from a neighbor’s orange tree and flinched at distant cannon fire. Pictographs and the soft background melody of other languages.
One door in a line of doors. And the other side of the prairie.
The church’s woodwork stayed original. Oak latticed the ceiling in high plateaus and dropped chandeliers from four corners. We imagined clearing out the pews and leveling the ramped floors, making the sanctuary a living room. We imagined using the basement, remodeled and surprisingly sunny, for artist residencies. We imagined fencing the backyard for Rainer and Zola to chase one another in figure eights. We imagined raising children there, where so many weddings had taken place. Beside the pulpit, a hidden door led to a cramped maintenance room behind the organ. While your muffled voice asked the realtor whether it still played, I enjoyed, in the frail light, feeling dwarfed by that forest of dormant brass.
When you asked me to marry you, months before, we were eating sandwiches on the floor of the RV you borrowed from work. The framework still warm from the engine. My engagement ring was a plastic pull tab from a carton of almond milk. Plastic, eternal as diamond, as gold. You proposed again a few hours later on the Calamus sand as the sun was setting, with blueberry wine reflecting the purple lake. Soon after, we’d swap the plastic ring for a vintage solitaire we picked together online. Perhaps a hundred years old, it cost us only a few hundred dollars, the gold scuffed and the diamond a small cataract eye. Still, in a certain light—the public library, your parents’ kitchen, the Alley Rose, dusk on the Platte—we were silenced by its million colored sparks.
As the date of our elopement approached, so did commencement. At work, I embossed hundreds of diplomas by hand with a heavy iron push-crank seal. If I
leaned close, I could hear the thick, textured parchment creak when emblazoned. Each diploma slid between layers of acetate and tissue into a plain white envelope. A few students requested alternative names on their diplomas. Some wanted both parents’ surnames, others went by chosen names, and others had recently married. It was not infrequent in those weeks that someone would say to me, with a lot of warmth, The next time I see you, you’ll have a different name! It was awkward, the first few times, explaining that I might keep my own, without addition.
Out of curiosity I twisted off my ring and examined its inner rim, expecting some stamp, some engraved name or date left by a couple before us. Something that, with Google and a little sleuth work, could lead me in the direction of a winding and elapsed romance. Instead, I found something more direct. And more elusive. A thin script in fourteen karats simply read:
L O V E S T O R Y
I tossed the book aside onto the quilt. It was an old book, from college, an anthology of short stories I used to think were brilliant but that these days all came across as melodramatic. Now only one story moved me—an American on foreign soil, worry that gave way to a quiet love, almost plotless—strangely the only one I didn’t remem-ber from college. That was when I told you about the ring’s inscription, flexing my fingers and watching our diamond flash in dim light.
Huh. Now I’m thinking of something that would make a good short story. I mean, if I were a writer. Or a certain kind of writer. It’d be one of those runaway bride stories. Except she’s running away from her own elopement, which is funny because it’s an elopement she planned. She puts on her wedding dress and runs out of the Airbnb. Except they’re in the mountains in winter, and it’s fifty miles to the next town, so she ends up walking back, kind of embarrassed. And the guy’s still there.
Then?
They would probably still have sex. And end up laughing about something. Maybe about how they’d have to avoid the Airbnb host, since they told her they were there to get married. Maybe they’d have to lie to her, pretend to be husband and wife.
And that moment would unite them again?
Yeah. And I think the story would end with them at a gas station. There has to be a gas station in there somewhere.
When we broke the news of our engagement, people seemed excited to tell us how our love story, in some way, was an extension of their own.
Your brother Jacob reminded you of how he’d given Lona a metal key-chain ring prior to an engagement ring, like the plastic one before my own. My mother was quick to point out how she wore a marquise diamond too. Colleagues told me they knew couples with our soon-to-be anniversary date—a sign of good luck, as these couples went on to live happily for decades. Judy told us the story of her elopement one night over brisket and potatoes. Bob wasn’t Jewish, and she couldn’t find a synagogue that would approve it, so they went defiantly across state borders where they could marry themselves. She told us not to laugh but that she changed into her wedding dress in a gas-station bathroom. We didn’t laugh. Instead, we thought we might carry on the tradition.
When the day of commencement came, I treated it like any other day. I slept easily the night before, and as students trickled into the field house that morning in full regalia, the planned operations all fell into place. I had chosen not to attend my own college commencement, but congratulating students on their momentous day did not feel ironic. Throughout the event, you sent me messages and pictures from the RV shop. Coils of colored wires at your feet. The warbled splay of light on the walls of the garage. A red vehicle sliced open, its metal edges frilled like flesh and shining softly in warm light like a sacred heart. I pocketed my phone and watched as graduates were ushered back through the doors of the field house after the ceremony. They seemed more beautiful than before, their tassels swinging on the opposite side of their caps.
Afterward, my officemates and I made a break for Cunningham’s Journal, a gastropub that had once been a publishing house. As I licked barbecue sauce from my fingers, I enjoyed picturing my friends and myself cheerfully working its invisible presses. The endless stamping and sealing and pushing off would not be far from the job I already had. That afternoon, I tried paying more attention to the restaurant as it now stood. Though every table was taken, there were no graduates to be seen. Until, as one table began stacking their plates, one woman in the party walked off to the bathroom. When she came back out, she was wearing a dress. And a commencement gown. Its sleeves blown open like car doors.
Above us was the Switzerland of America lookout point—that title engraved in antique curlicues on a massive wooden plank where dozens of black-puffered skiers huddled for pictures before blue snow-capped peaks. We managed to find a muddy pull-off no one noticed, and a trailhead half-hidden by a tangle of bare trees. You walked down, passed an open gate, and waved me over to a pristine mound of snow in the sink of the Uncompahgre. We hung our coats on a wooden post and shivered excitedly, kissing before we were supposed to kiss. I pulled out your ring, warm, from the left cup of my bra. Hadn’t we felt we were already married? Hadn’t the blue heron—its bowed body and otherworldly flight—been witness to our union? A group of hikers and their dog stepped up over a range and halted in their tracks, their smiles outstretched wings.
We’re on our way back into the village, and my eyes pass through my lap in white silk. My eyes pass through the plastic peonies I borrowed from a vase at the office, which was actually a dormitory, and which would one day soon be a country with one door left standing. My eyes pass through to you, steering us down this thin road into a valley steaming with springs. My eyes pass through steep rock faces. The mountain runoff had refrozen into massive icicles like the pipes of church organs.
It’s weird, I laugh. It feels like we just got married! And you laugh too. We might spend the rest of our lives working into that mystery.
Gabriela Valencia’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Four Way Review, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Sand, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry from Boston University. www.gabrielavalencia.net
Photo by Zacqueline Baldwin on Unsplash
