I don't want another story.

tzury asked me to marry him last night. he asked me just like that and i said yes. it was not a grandiose pre-meditated moment, far from anything i had ever imagined. there was not even a ring. 

i said yes then grew quiet, probably from the shock of how far the reality of the moment was from my imagining of it. i considered whether years of American culture and reality TV had effectively taken their toll: was i so deeply brainwashed by the tales of elaborate proposals and glamorous rings that i could not just revel in the beauty of this quite different approach by someone i simply wanted to spend the rest of my life with?

i hated to think that was so. i imagined the question that would invariably follow the news of my engagement to the man i loved - "how did he do it?" - and wondered what i would say. 

"um we were laughing about something in bed. and um chatting. and then he asked me." 

a few things came before. a wedding and a funeral, to be precise (no joke). two consecutive days of emotional intensity set the stage for the proposal that followed one late Wednesday night, as anti-climactic as it was. 

although the truth of the matter is that maybe anti-climatic is fitting for us. having met barely 2 months ago, then moving in together barely 1 month after that, people thought we were crazy to be going so fast. how could we be so sure, especially as set as we were in our independent ways at our age? did we even really know each other yet? 

but those 2 months were full of solid moments of positive reinforcement. we cooked and cleared closet space. met each others' friends and family (including over Skype). we visited Ikea and spent 4 days in Rome. and of course attended that wedding and that funeral. we discovered we had stores of patience for each other that never seemed to wane, and that being together was never dull even if were just watching bad TV.

as accelerated as things might have seemed from the outside, for us things were just moving forward as they should. every once in a while we would stop to marvel at our strange reality and laugh at the giddy conviction we thought only teenagers could feel when they were dating someone new. 

but in general we agreed, if something feels this natural and obvious why would we possibly waste time and energy fighting it?

so maybe tzury’s whispered proposal under the covers in the dark makes perfect sense. and the way his question came rolling out followed by my answer (i made him ask me again just to be sure). another story involving helicopters and hot air balloons might be more fun to tell. but this one is mine.