“You realize clover is literally just lawn weed?” she complained over the phone.
“Neither is your attitude very polite,” I replied with a grin.
“I’m seriously reconsidering this relationship,” she teased.
“You’d miss me too much,” I said.
“Unfortunately, you might be right,” she muttered.
I loved her before I fully understood how frightened I was of losing her. As the months passed, Chloe’s condition gradually became worse, but I stayed. I drove her to treatments, sat beside her during appointments, and held her hand when she was scared. Eventually, hospital cafeterias became more familiar to me than actual restaurants. I knew which parking garage elevator was always broken, and I learned how to sleep sitting upright in uncomfortable chairs.
I learned that when Chloe was nauseated, she wanted silence, but when she was in pain, she wanted conversation. So I learned how to talk about absolutely nothing, including movies, food, people we’d seen in the hallway, and the weather. Anything that could make the minutes move a little faster worked wonders. Eighteen months after we met, I proposed. It wasn’t elaborate, without a fancy restaurant or a carefully planned surprise. We were sitting on the floor of my apartment eating takeout from a local diner because Chloe had been discharged from the hospital that afternoon and didn’t have enough energy to sit at the table.
I pulled out a ring from my pocket. She stared at it, looked at me, and then started crying uncontrollably. I thought that meant yes, but it didn’t.
