This Life

Saturday night after Jacob went to bed - yes, there is an 'after Jacob went to bed' in our current lives - Zach agreed to go through some photos I've been bugging him to get to for a few months. It drives me crazy me that something in our house is not organized, and mostly I wanted the cooler back that he had been using to store them for the past few years. I have no idea why he choose a picnic-variety cooler to store his photos in, but now it belongs to the kitchen again.

I had actually finally gone through the photos myself about a month ago because, well, what's his is mine (but not vice versa). After a while though it sort of felt like an intrusion. Most of the photos were from his college years, which is pre-Me because I was too busy being in middle school. I've always been quite jealous of Zach's college years because his were full of partying and good times with the others runners. I didn't have college years like that because all but the first year of college involved driving home to see Zach on most weekends. In a strange way I feel like that should give me leverage in our current relationship.

But anyway, there I was looking over his pictures of all the good times - the old girlfriend, the keg stands, the travel races - and I suddenly felt like an outsider. Like the person I'm married to is not the person in those pictures. I can never know that person. Weird. Well I have my own secrets from college that will never show up in a picture, so I guess we are kind of even.

We eventually got to the post-college running years, the years Zach spent as a top runner in our area. Sometimes I forget that even happened. I tagged along on the road trips to all the different races (on my weekends home from college), I started running myself, and I even roller-bladed beside him for 23 miles for his last long run the weekend before a marathon. We had a thing and it was cool. We both miss that time. Now we are parents and live in a house with bills to pay and dinner to cook, and unending laundry, all of which causes us to be at each others' throats 24/7. We have a great life but it's so sad to have to give up what keeps you going for a different kind of happy.

Zach told me, "It all feels like a dream, like it never really happened." And that's exactly the way I feel about those precious college years when I was constantly on the brink of having freedom. But now the photos are all tucked safely away in that album purchased half a dozen years ago, and only the echoes of distant college memories can be heard bouncing around the cooler that's back in my kitchen. And I don't regret exchanging one life for another.