We Fell in Love Trading Metaphors
It began as a game in a workshop and ended in vows.
The first thing Dev ever gave me was a simile, and it was terrible. We were in a Tuesday night poetry workshop in the back room of a library that smelled like radiator dust, and the exercise was to describe loneliness without using the word. He read his aloud: loneliness is like a vending machine at 3 a.m., fully stocked, completely ignored. The room made polite workshop noises. I laughed so loudly that the facilitator looked at me over her glasses.
Afterward, by the coffee urn that produced something legally distinct from coffee, he came up to me and said, you laughed. I said, it was funny. He said, it was supposed to be devastating. I said, that's what made it funny.
He looked at me for a second, the way you look at a crossword clue you suddenly understand, and said: fine. Your turn. Loneliness... Go.
I said the first thing that arrived: loneliness is a landline in a house where everyone has cell phones. It still works. Nobody checks.
He nodded slowly, like a judge at a dog show. That, he said, is devastating.
And that was it... That was the whole beginning. No numbers exchanged, no names even, just two strangers agreeing on the exchange rate between funny and sad.
The game had no name and no rules we ever said out loud, but it had rules. Every Tuesday, before workshop, one of us would name an abstract thing and the other had to pay for it in imagery, on the spot, no drafts. Hope. Envy. Sunday afternoons. The specific dread of a group text. We got competitive about it the way you only can with someone whose brain runs on your same voltage. I once spent an entire workday, an actual salaried workday, preparing three metaphors for boredom because I knew he'd pick that week's prompt and I refused to lose.
Here is what I didn't notice happening, because I was too busy winning: I was telling this man everything. You can't trade metaphors with someone for six months without handing over the blueprints. When I described envy as watching someone else's suitcase come down the carousel first, he knew about my sister. When he described home as a song you hate until it comes on in someone else's car, I knew about his father. We never said a single direct sentence to each other and we knew each other cold.
Falling in love with a writer is a specific hazard, and nobody warns you about the real danger. It isn't that they'll write about you. It's that they'll see you, in the exact way you've been carefully arranging not to be seen, and then they'll say it back to you in an image so accurate you can't even be angry.
He did it in November. I'd named fear that week, thinking it was safe, and he looked right at me by the coffee urn and said: fear is reading the last page of a book first, so nothing can ever surprise you again, not even joy.
I had never told him I did that with books.
I do that with books. I did it with everything.
The Plain Sentence Problem
We started meeting outside Tuesdays, which we described to ourselves as extending the game, the way smokers describe a pack a day as a social habit. Two coffee cups on a table at Marchetti's every Sunday, his always black, mine always a cappuccino he called beige nonsense. And slowly I discovered the catch in the machinery: Dev could say anything in a metaphor and almost nothing without one.
Ask him how his day was, you got weather systems and shipwrecks. Ask him what he felt, actually felt, in plain words, and something behind his eyes closed like a shop at lunch.
In February, after a night that had clearly moved past friendship for both of us, I asked him the plainest question I owned. He said... you're the first line of a poem I'm afraid to finish.
It's a good line. I want that noted for the record. It's a genuinely good line, and I said, that's beautiful, and don't you dare. Say it plain or don't say it.
He couldn't.
He sat there with his black coffee, a man who had described grief so precisely the week before that the facilitator had to take her glasses off, and he could not produce the three plainest words in the language. I went home and cried in the beige nonsense sense of the word, which is to say quietly and with self-catering.
I understood it, is the thing. That was the worst part. I'd been reading around the subject for months, poems filed under love that were really about the terror of it, and I recognized his condition because it was mine with better production values. A metaphor lets you say the true thing while keeping one foot out the door. If she flinches, it was just an image. If she laughs in the wrong place, you were only playing the game.
A metaphor is a hiding place, but it is also a door, and everything depends on whether you leave it open.
Three Tuesdays later, he skipped the workshop. I know, because I was there, not listening to a very long poem about herons. When I got home there was an envelope taped to my door. No name on it. Inside... a single index card.
It said: I love you. No image. I couldn't find one big enough.
Reader, the man wrote me the absence of a metaphor, and it was the most devastating metaphor he ever produced. I called him and said, you idiot, and he said, is that a yes, and I said, that wasn't even a question, and he said, it was supposed to be, I panicked, and we both stayed on the phone laughing in that shaky way that is mostly relief with a laughter glaze on it.
The Vows
We got married in May, in a garden that a metaphor would call modest and an accountant would call somebody's aunt's backyard. We wrote our own vows, obviously. Everyone who knew us braced for a performance, and honestly, so did I. I had prepared imagery. I had, God forgive me, a callback to the vending machine.
Dev went first. He unfolded his paper, looked at it, folded it back up... and put it in his pocket.
Then he said, in plain words, the plainest I have ever heard him use, that he loved me, that he had loved me since the landline, and that he intended to check the phone every day for the rest of his life.
Okay, so it was half plain. He's in recovery, not cured.
People ask us how we met, and we say a poetry workshop, and they say, that's so romantic, and we let them think they understand. They picture candlelight and murmured verses. They do not picture two overcaffeinated people weaponizing figurative language at each other across a library folding table for half a year because neither one could say a true sentence in daylight. But that's the version I'd put in the record, because it's ours, and because it taught me the only thing I know for certain about both poetry and marriage.
The image is how you get the truth out of the building. The plain sentence is where it has to live.
You need both. On our fridge there's a photo from the wedding, two coffee cups from Marchetti's superimposed by pure luck in the corner of the frame, his black, mine beige nonsense, and under it Dev has taped an index card, no image, no game, just plain words doing their plain, impossible work: still the first line. Still not afraid of the ending.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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