One of Joseph's pictures on Hinge was of him holding two donuts. I was immediately intrigued.
I was on nights in my second year of residency, so we mostly chatted online at first. Our first time "meeting" was a FaceTime session from my call room. My schedule made a real date difficult to plan. On December 12, 2021, Joseph asked if he could deliver a box of cookies to me in the hospital.
Audrey, my co-resident, held my pager while I went down to meet Joseph. He was sitting on a ledge inside the Manning Drive entryway to the N.C. Cancer Hospital. He was holding a small box of cookies that he had baked with friends earlier that evening. We exchanged the small talk and furtive glances that two people romantically interested in each other do when meeting for the first time. I will always remember the way he smelled--Maison Margiela's By The Fireplace. I went back upstairs to the reality of work and shared the box of cookies with Audrey, my first time of a lifetime eating Joseph's baking.
By April of my first year of residency, not uncommon was it for Rodrigo and I to be ships passing in the night, or morning, or the hours between. At that time we volleyed between opposite schedules for weeks. Calvin, Hobbes, and Wren surely were not protesting; they had a warm lap at all hours.
Reprieve came April 8 when we would be off on a Saturday, together. Our routine at that point, Rodrigo said we’d spend Saturday morning at the farmers market before getting new books at the Durham public library. To his frustration (unbeknownst to me at the time) and to my trying to maximize the weekend, I invited a friend, Riley, to brunch in between the market and library.
I can’t recall what we got from the market but chances are something from Strong Arm Bakery. We stood in cold rain waiting for a spot at Monuts where we ate breakfast sandwiches, doughnuts, and coffee—far more restrained compared to college days. On leaving, Rodrigo asked Riley if she’d like to come to the library, which I found odd.
At the library, we parted to find our desired books. I was walking around unhappy with few being available; he seemed to be pacing around similarly. Between the shelves for fiction books, authors L-K, he approached my side as I bent to see if Demon Copperhead was present. “Why are you following me?” I poked at him. He responded by putting the one book and umbrella I was carrying aside on a shelf, trading them for my hands.
I’ll keep the next utterances for myself, not filmed, not witnessed by anyone other than us, moments which will exist only insofar as we do, together. The answer was yes, which seems simple in hindsight, but culminated from a past and present and dreams and generations and happenstances that can never be represented in words, here, but which I’ll leave to the amalgam of the stories surrounding us in those moments.
The In Between