2004-03-30 | 1:34 p.m.
eyelashes, shooting stars, and wishbones

i have been afraid to write this entry. i knew it had to be done, but i've been avoiding doing it because i know that i cannot do justice to the things that have happened and the way that i feel about them. but like i just said, i have to do it. i will kick myself someday (and some other days, too) if i don't.

so. jeff and i decided this past thanksgiving that, instead of blowing a whole bunch of our time off traveling to be with family, we would have our own thanksgiving dinner. it wasn't off-limits to anyone else -- friends would've been welcome -- but it ended up that everyone else was leaving town or whatever, so it was just jeff and me.

we cooked a too-big turkey (they just don't make them two people size), gravy, stuffing, green bean casserole, and an apple pie (i'm almost positive there was something else, but i can't remember what it was). we also had some rosemary rolls, but we forgot about them until we happened upon them like a week later, and they looked more like dirty, squished tennis balls than rolls. i did most of the cooking, but that doesn't even begin to make up for the fact that jeff makes me dinner just about all the other days of the year. he helped me peel the apples for the pie, took pictures of me getting all yucky rubbing butter on the turkey, and got mad at me for dumping a little bit of turkey fat down the drain when i was making the gravy, "you'll clog the drain!"

at that point, when he turned on the hot water to wash away the sinister fat, we discovered that something had beat my turkey fat to the punch. as the water backed up into the sink i saw a few flecks of bright green float up from below. "jeffrey, did you put the apple stuff down the sink?" he had. ten apples worth of peels and cores. and he was freaking out about a few tablespoons of turkey fat (i don't understand it either). so we tried turning on the disposal, but all that did was cause a bunch of nasty sink drain crud to spew out of the other side of the sink (all over a bunch of clean dishes in the drying rack). so we ended up stacking all the dishes from all our preparations all over the very limited counterspace in jeff's kitchen as we finished making our dinner.

he carved the turkey as it teetered on the only edge of open counterspace left, and i took the meat as he cut it and separated it onto light meat and dark meat plates. when all that was left was bones, we found the wishbone and cut it off the carcass. my mom always used to make us clean it off then wait a day for it to dry out, which i always thought was ridiculous and took all the fun out of it. i told him about this promptly followed by, "but my mom's not here, so let's go!"

now, i must interject here that for a while i had been wishing, whenever an appropriate wishing occasion presented itself, for the same thing. it's what i do. when it's 11:11, there's an eyelash to be blown away, i see a shooting star, etc., i have a pre-selected wish, and i keep wishing and wishing that same wish until it comes true. i figure the more times i wish something, the greater the likelihood that it'll come true. it may just be that by doing this i implant the wishes in my subconscious and then unknowingly do most of the legwork in making them come true, but as long as my wishes keep coming true, i'm not going to question it.

we wished. we broke. i won!

"woohoo! i win!"

"what'd you wish for?"

"i'm not telling."

"c'mon, you can tell me."

"no, i can't, or it won't come true."

"come ooonnn."

"no!"

he gave up and handed me a paper towel, "your hands are all greasy." (remember, the sink is backed up, so i can't wash them there.) i wiped my hands cursorily - we still weren't done, and i figured they'd be getting dirty again - and handed the paper towel to him to throw away. he eyed my hands and gave me a disappointed look that very clearly said, "you did a lousy job," as he handed me back the paper towel. i wiped them again, and i guess i did a sufficient job this time because he took the towel and threw it away.

the next thing i knew, he had taken my hands and was down on one knee, and i and all my senses were suddenly in a state of utter shock and euphoria. at that point i had what i can most accurately describe as an out-of-body experience. i felt like i was high... i don't mean on drugs, although it did feel somewhat similar to when i got my wisdom teeth out and the oral surgeon gave me nitrous oxide; i mean i felt like i was looking down on us from up above us... as he asked me, "megan, will you marry me?" the words even sounded like they were coming from far away. this was exactly what i had just wished for... i guess knew it was gonna happen sometime, but as i explained earlier, i had been wishing that wish for a while and in a sort of general sense. i never expected that one of those times i wished it it would just instantly come true. it was the last moment at which i would have expected it, and yet i can't imagine a more precisely perfect moment for it, which only adds to its perfection.

so then all of me that was up above us came crashing down, and i collapsed onto the kitchen floor in front of him. we kissed as i worked my way up to my knees, level with him, when i realized, hey, stupid, you didn't answer him. i stopped kissing long enough to choke out my "yes." it was feeble because i was on such a high that i just wasn't in full possession of my faculties, but in my life i have never meant anything more. he asked me if that was what i'd wished for, and since there was no longer any risk of jynxing it, i told him that it was. there was more kissing and squeezing and such and then at some point we decided we'd better get back to our dinner before it got cold or something like that. and the sweetest thing, as we got up, jeffrey wiped tears from his eyes. sigh.

as we went on with our thanksgiving dinner, he lamented the fact that he hadn't gotten me a ring yet or taken me out to a fancy-schmancy restaurant because he thought that he could've potentially ruined the surprise of the moment, but i told him then, and i'll tell him now: jeffrey, it was perfect. i went through the entire rest of the weekend floating on that high.

i feel like the most superlatively special girl in the whole world; jeffrey wants to marry me.

heck, i'm still floating.