I volunteered for the third row of the Uber, a fold-up bench crammed in the cargo area where you can’t sit up straight. My friend Ellen had a bad knee, and I was already in a funk, so when everyone else settled into the real seats, I, the tallest of the group, folded myself into the back without protest. Classic people pleaser.
With my knees pressed against my chest, I texted my boyfriend Ryan: “I’m currently stuffed in the third row of a Mitsubishi and can’t sit up straight. No one’s talking to me. I’m just back here. I am not doing well.”
I was seven days into a nine-day writing residency in Halifax, Nova Scotia, nearly a thousand miles from my home near Kingston, Ontario. The other women, all of us friends from last year’s residency, chatted away while I sat behind them, invisible by choice as much as circumstance. I was staying with my classmate Trina to save money, but I was socially and mentally drained.
Ryan had been quiet all day running errands back home. Finally he texted: “So you’re going straight to dinner now?”
“Yup,” I replied. “I’m considering a hotel room. Maybe it’s just me. I get in my head a lot, as you know.”
We had been dating for a year, long enough for him to know my patterns of self-erasure but not long enough for me to believe someone could love me through them.
At the restaurant, with its exposed brick, warm lighting and locally sourced everything, I felt like I was watching through shaded glass. I had felt this invisibility before and gotten good at disappearing, at fitting myself into whatever space people needed me to fill.
But Ryan had been different from our first date. While others suggested coffee or something low-key, he had booked us into a Sherlock Holmes escape room.
We’d been living together for months now, but still, old patterns die hard. Last month, after a tiny disagreement about groceries, my body responded as if the situation was life threatening. I locked myself in our bathroom and hit my temples with my fists until physical pain drowned out emotional chaos. My nervous system couldn’t quite believe this relationship was different.
He found me shaking and held me without making me feel broken. He just loved me through it, steady and patient.
Now, staring at the restaurant entrance, I suddenly saw him. Ryan was somehow here, scanning the dining room with the nervous smile from our first date. Was I hallucinating?
And then he saw me, his face lighting up with relief. I stood up so quickly that my chair loudly scraped the floor, drawing startled looks from my table mates.
“What are you doing here?” I said, my voice cracking with shock and disbelief.
He crossed the dining room as other diners watched with idle curiosity. When he reached our table, he wrapped me in his arms, and I held on like someone drowning, breathing in the familiar scent of his body wash mixed with the faint sweetness of bubble gum.
“What are you doing here?” I said again. “How are you here?”
“This is Ryan,” I said to my table mates, whose faces showed delight and confusion. “My boyfriend.”
I sat down and pulled out a chair for him.
“I have something to ask you first,” he said, nervously.
When I turned to face him, he lowered himself to one knee.
Chewing his gum with intensity, hands trembling, Ryan fumbled with a small box. His eyes met mine, and I saw everything there: love, terror and hope all tangled in a way that made my chest ache.
“So are you going to ask me?”
He blushed. “Will you marry me?”
My friends erupted in gasps and whoops, but all I could see was Ryan’s face, vulnerable and present.
“Yes!” I said, shaking my head in shock.
Later, in his rental car, he said, “I’ve been planning this for weeks. I was driving around Halifax all afternoon trying to find you.”
“You said you were driving to Canadian Tire,” I said.
He smiled. “I was driving to the airport.”
We spent that night in an upgraded Jacuzzi suite. In his nervous state, Ryan had booked a hotel room for the wrong date, a month in the future, so they took pity on us. The next morning, we explored Halifax like tourists, eating ice cream on the waterfront despite the June chill, lying tangled in a hammock on the boardwalk.
On Saturday night, Ryan had to fly back. My 13-year-old son was with his father for the weekend, and someone needed to pick him up on Sunday. That someone was always Ryan when I was away.
“I wish you could stay,” I said, watching him pack.
“Me too,” he said. “But I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
I spent one last night at my classmate Trina’s house, then headed to the airport with Ellen on Sunday. She had changed her flight to match mine, a gesture I hadn’t expected but, it turned out, would desperately need.
At the departure lounge, while charging my phone, I looked up to another surprise. Walking toward my gate was the man who had assaulted me years before.
When I was 19, desperate for connection and naïve about consent, this man had invited me to his apartment after a first date to watch a movie. He gave me vodka shots until the room spun, showed me crude porn as some kind of twisted foreplay, then had sex with my barely conscious body while I stared at his ceiling fan, trying not to vomit.
I didn’t have language for what had happened until years later. After, he had asked if I was going to tell my roommates I had lost my virginity “without a condom,” grinning as if we had shared something special instead of an assault that would take me years to process.
The story got worse. Later, when I desperately needed a place to live, having fled an untenable roommate situation, I had moved into his apartment as a platonic roommate. I was wary but had nowhere to go, and maybe I also wanted to normalize whatever we had been to each other.
Those months were their own kind of hell. The filth he lived in. The way he acted like I owed him something for taking me in even though I paid rent.
Now, 15 years later, he walked past me with what looked like his wife. He looked older, softer, completely unremarkable.
“Ellen,” I said quietly, “you see that guy in the blue shirt?”
She followed my gaze. “Yes, who is he?”
“That’s the guy I lost my virginity to.” The words felt inadequate for what had actually happened.
Ellen knew the whole story. During late-night conversations at Trina’s house, I had told her everything.
“Cootie boy,” Ellen said, her voice carrying across the departure lounge.
I looked at her, confused.
“Cootie boy,” she said again, louder, staring directly at him.
His head snapped up at the sound, scanning the area until his eyes found me.
I was wearing an engagement ring from a man who had flown a thousand miles to propose to me in public. I was pursuing my master’s degree. I had Ellen beside me, protective without being asked.
“He recognizes you,” Ellen whispered.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
On the plane, he and his wife sat two rows ahead of us. Ellen, who had worked the flight attendant to let us sit together, spoke loudly about wedding ideas and my writing successes, making sure he understood exactly who I was now. No longer the desperate 19-year-old he had taken advantage of but a graduate student and loving partner with a support system. Someone worth protecting.
As our plane descended toward Ottawa, I thought about invisibility. How I had perfected it as a form of protection, made myself small to avoid disappointment. About volunteering for discomfort because claiming space felt selfish. How I had confused being overlooked with being safe.
But Ryan had seen me from the beginning. He had found me in a Halifax restaurant he had located through desperate Googling. Not because I was perfect or convenient, but because I mattered to him. For someone who had spent years believing that love meant earning your keep through perfect behavior, being chosen for exactly who I was felt like a miracle.
I thought about Ryan waiting for me at home and my son surely gaming in his room but ready to hear about my trip. And it occurred to me that love isn’t something you must earn through suffering, or earn at all. Sometimes it just arrives, nervous and gum-chewing, ready to kneel in a restaurant full of strangers.
Kimberley Falk is a writer and communications specialist near Kingston, Ontario.
Modern Love can be reached at [email protected].
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