we’re tethered to the story we must tell, when i saw you well i knew we’d tell it well

“Oh how I love this time of day,” I declare to the boy sitting next to me and take a long slurp of my strawberry and peach smoothie.

“How come?” Walter asks. We’re sitting on the trunk of my car outside the laundromat, tightly bundled in our warmest winter coats guarding ourselves from the below-freezing temperatures while our clothes tumble around the warm dryer inside. “It’s cold.”

“Yes, it is cold,” I concede, but turn and smile at him. “But only on those really cold winter nights does the sky get clear enough to see all of the colors of the sunset.”

Walter eyes me skeptically and looks at the city skyline in the distance with buildings whose office windows are still glowing despite the growing late hour.

“See there,” I point toward the horizon, “it’s still bright yellow and orange there, but as we look up it gets darker and darker until right above us we can see the stars.”

Walter follows my hand as I point out the night’s pallet to him, but his nose still scrunches up in skepticism when he returns his gaze to mine.

“I guess.”

I just laugh at him and shove him gently in the shoulder. “I love how skeptical you are,” I tell him. “That means you’re smart.”

I take another long drink of my smoothie and let out a satisfied moan. “Oh man, I love smoothies.”

“You sure do love a lot of things,” Walter says.

“I guess I do. You find that strange?”

He just shrugs at me.

“What do you love?” I ask.

“Harry Potter,” he answers instantly and we both laugh and I nod my head in agreement. “And my mom and I guess my sisters. And my Transformers. And Katie.”

“Who’s Katie?”

“Just a girl at school.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t know if I love her or not. I think I do.” I only hum and take another drink of my smoothie. “How am I supposed to know if I love her? I don’t even know what love is.”

“Love is a lot of things,” I tell him and smile.

“Does it make me a wimp if I love her? My friend Frankie says love is for pussies.”

“Whoa, watch that vocabulary kiddo,” I say barely containing my laughter. “And you tell Frankie he’s the pussy.” And I wink at him. “We lose ourselves in the things we love, but we find ourselves there too.”

Walter is wise beyond his years and he nods at me as if my explanation makes perfect sense, though I’m not sure even I understand the depths of what I’m trying to say.

“She’s extraordinary,” he says and one of those face-splitting smiles breaks out across his face and his innocent happiness is irresistibly contagious. “She makes everything extraordinary.”

“Sounds like love to me,” I say and rock my body towards his to bump his shoulder with mine.

I think about Walter’s question the whole way home. What is love?

Oh, love is so many little things. Talking in the dark, waiting for the phone to ring, inside jokes and laughter. It’s sharing fries and milkshakes. It’s giving balloons instead of flowers because they inexplicably make you smile. It’s holding hands in the car, it’s singing along to the radio, it’s camping in the rain, it’s standing on the top of a mountain with the wind in your hair. It’s giving you my tomatoes and taking your mushrooms. It’s the fighting and making up again. It’s that first drowsy thought in the morning and that last kiss at night. It’s always being there, no matter what.

And somewhere between all of the laughs, long talks, longer drives, stupid fights and all of the jokes, love just falls into place.

Walter thinks Katie is extraordinary. Walter doesn’t realize how extraordinary he is. We too often see love as an impossibly complicated thing. But it isn’t. Love is simple. It is so simple that you can see it in someone’s face, you can see it in things they do every day without them uttering a single word.