The air was a bit chilly there, especially on the ferry from the wharf to Alcatraz. But I got by with a sweater. My human radiator of a husband got by with just a button down shirt. Because he is a Martian.
Though P and I had been living together for over a year, I still had a giddy newlywed feeling. The most amazing man alive, in my estimation, had chosen me. We'd gathered our closest friends and family into one room--something that we'll never get to do again--and we said, Sure. We said, I pick you. We said, It's been rough and it may be rougher. But I want to do it with you.
I hadn't been that happy in a long time.
We were both making more money than we ever had, and the kitchen in our rented guesthouse sat unused--save the mini-fridge, which held wine and cheese. We ran all over the city, eating all the seafood we could, and trying ethnic cuisines that not even our sweet home Chicago could offer. We fell in love with the plant life there. We cursed the city we loved and called home for it's inability to support a jade bush outdoors.
Like most things in my life, the best parts of the trip were unplanned. Google all you want, but stumbling upon a tea store with a tasting bar manned by a guy who know everything about tea? Nothing gets better than that.
What I didn't realize until we were flying home, watching California fade below us was that for almost a week, I hadn't been sad. It had been four months since my mom died, and four months of intense sadness. As happy as the wedding had made me, it also reminded me that my mother was not there in attendance. But the honeymoon was a week off. I couldn't believe that I'd been able to go 5 days without crying. The tears came on the plane, as I wished I could call her when we landed to tell her about it all. I cried realizing that when I got home, my mom would still be dead, I would still be sad, the first holiday season without her was approaching, and that the week had been an exception and not a new chapter.
A year later, I am spending my day reading and writing, and drinking a puerh tea, aged a year. It's dried wrinkled leaves sit shriveled in a glass canister on our tea shelf. It tastes like the earth. It smells like outside. It is not blended over with a fruity infusion, and it does not take honey or sugar. No getting around that you are drinking a plant.
Perhaps that week of exile from grief was indeed the beginning of the next chapter, a flip of the page. I had someone with whom to grieve, yes. But white dress and open bar or not, P would have been there with me. What began in San Francisco and evolved all year was a keener sense of reality than I'd ever had. Like a good puerh tea, a good life is gnarled and cultivated, ugly and steeped. Sometimes, tea is just tea. It tastes like the earth from which is came and there is no need for cranberries or cardamom. And sometimes we desperately need a fruity distraction from reality.
I still enjoy both varieties of tea. It's learning to live with both and not knowing which you'll be served when that gives me challenge.
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