opticnerve

I was cleaning out the pockets of my jacket this evening. I have this habit of accumulating crap in my pockets and forgetting about it - old receipts, gum wrappers I had meant to recycle, notes I had written to remind myself to do stuff like sign up for ballroom dance lessons. Anyway. As I was sorting through the detritus, I found this ticket from a movie that MJ and I had seen about a week before I asked her to marry me. I had missed it in my recent purge of mementoes of her. It was some cheesy hip hop dance movie from a few years back that we saw at a repertory theatre in Ottawa. At the time, we snickered at all the horrible dialogue spoken so stiffly by the beautiful but wooden actors. Afterwards, we had this private joke between us where we would try to work in lines from the movie into our conversations, such as saying that making lasagna isn't about who you are or where you come from, it's about the streets. Silly shit like that. It was stuff like this that made me think that this was the girl I wanted to spend my life with.

I sat at the kitchen counter staring at that stupid ticket as I rubbed it between my fingers like Aladdin trying to summon the genie from the lamp. I looked up at the stove clock and noticed that about an hour had passed since I had started sorting through my pockets.