Luz

Believe it or not, when I was seven years old, I knew who I wanted to marry. 

Her name was Lucía Mariposa Sosa, but she asked everyone to call her Luz.  She was the prettiest girl in the entire third grade and had the longest, shiniest, golden brown hair I’d ever seen in my life (which wasn’t a very extensive life, considering I was seven at the time).  I could swim in her hair if I really wanted to.  Unfortunately for me, Luz loved everyone and was loved by everyone.  When I realized she was the one I wanted to marry, I knew I would have to fight basically everyone our age for her attention. 

There were some tough battles.  Whenever lunch time came, everyone offered Luz the other half of their oreo or a sip of their Kool Aid drink.  When it was recess, everyone asked Luz to come play freeze tag with them.  In gym when it was time to pick teams, everyone always wanted Luz on their team.  Our gym teacher, Mr. Finch, had to bring at least two kids to the nurse’s office everyday because of that. 

It was Monday, January 31, 2000 when I knew Luz was the one I wanted to marry.  It was a blustery blizzard day, and since we lived in a small town in northern Michigan, not many kids showed up for school.  It was only those kids who lived down the road or had mothers that would make their kids go to school even if the world was coming to an end who actually went that day.  Luz fell under the former.  I fell under the latter.  There were only five of us in the class.  We had a substitute teacher, Miss Kramer, who asked us to find a buddy and read to each other.  The other three kids, Pam, Eddie, and Michelle, started fighting over who would be Luz’s reading buddy.  I just sat there quietly, as I always did whenever things like this happened, and bet with myself a cookie to see who would win this time.  In the end, Eddie peed in his pants from so much excitement and had to go home, while Pam and Michelle (who were best friends, by the way) argued so much that Miss Kramer didn’t know what to do and brought both of them to the principal’s office.  Luz and I just sat there silently in the reading corner, Luz looking at me and me looking at the floor, until it happened. 

Luz got up, walked over to me, held a book in front of my face and asked, “Hi.  Would you like to read Amber Brown is Not a Crayon with me?”

I was stunned.  In all the years I’d known Luz (which actually was only a few months considering I met her at the beginning of third grade), I’d never seen her come up and talk to me like that before.  Okay, so we were the only ones left in the room and obviously we were going to be paired up for reading buddies, but she could’ve waited until Miss Kramer came back and we all read together, or she just could’ve absolutely refused to read with me at all.  But instead, we pulled our carpet squares together and ended up finishing Amber Brown is Not a Crayon, Ramona Quimby, Age 8, and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom all before Miss Kramer returned to put Pam and Michelle in two separate corners of the room for a time out.

I wasn’t ready to fight everyone for Luz’s attention.  But it turns out that after that wintry day, I didn’t have to.  When everyone argued to have Luz pick them to be her partner caretaker for the hamsters, Luz picked me.  I was always there for Luz.  And Luz always picked me.

She chose my shoulders to lean on in the fourth grade when Luz broke her leg after jumping off the swings.  She picked me as her vice president when she won student president in the fifth grade.  I was there when her so-called “friends” turned their back on her in the sixth grade, when her parents divorced in the seventh, and when her first big crush moved to Kentucky in the eighth.  I was there for her when every boyfriend broke her heart, when her step-father tried to rape her, when she was humiliated at our high school prom, and when she almost shaved off her whole head.  She picked me to escort her to every school dance, to be her lab partner, to drive her and all her things to college.  I was always there for Luz.  And Luz always picked me.

Well, almost.  Throughout all those years (now that there was a difference between seven years and twenty four), I still knew I wanted to marry her, even after going out with a few girls from time to time.  I wasn’t a turtle-in-a-shell all the time, just when I was around Luz – which, okay, was practically all the time.  But as I was talking to a friend one day, he told me I needed to man up.

“Do you love her?” he asked me.

I almost blurted out a “yes,” only because I’d been telling myself that every day for the past seventeen years of my life.  But instead I thought really hard about it before answering.

“Yeah, I do.  I really do.”  So my friend said I needed to take some action or everything was just going to stay this way until Luz and I died.  I said that I didn’t want that to happen.

So what’d I do?  I picked a day.  I bought a book.  I collected all the courage that could ever exist within me.  Then I invited Luz to go out for a walk after I made dinner for her at her house – the same house she grew up in.  She said it was the best dinner I’d ever made.  I told her I was glad.  We strolled down the road, me blubbering whatever came to mind, and Luz, laughing just to be a good sport, until we reached our old elementary school.  Then we stood outside for a few minutes as it began to snow until I asked her if she wanted to go inside.  Luz agreed, so we went in.  We wandered around the building for a little while – aimlessly for Luz, purposefully for me.  I made sure we ended up at our third-grade classroom and walked inside.  We both smiled and laughed as we reminisced about the old days and all the incidents that had occurred.  Then we sat in the reading corner and pulled out some books to read together.  I asked her if she remembered what happened at the reading corner that blizzard day.  She said there were millions of blizzard days, and that she didn’t remember which one I was talking about.  So I told her how I remembered that it was on this exact day and recounted the detailed event for her.  She smiled brightly and her long, golden brown hair (still the longest I’ve ever seen in my life) swished around her as she laughed her delicate, light laugh.  I pulled out the copy of Amber Brown is Not a Crayon that I had placed on the shelf earlier and handed it to her, asking her to read it to me.  She took it gently, and we snuggled up on one of the carpet squares together as she began to read.  She read it just as I remembered.  Then when she turned the last page, she found the ring attached to the back cover and gasped. 

“Lucía Mariposa Sosa, will you marry me?”

She looked at the book, then the ring, then my face.  “Yes,” she said, and smiled.
It’s ironic how the happiest and saddest day of my life could happen all within two weeks.

Luz left exactly two weeks after she had agreed to marry me.  She left without notice, without saying goodbye, without telling anyone where she was going or why.  She did leave a note for me, though, written on the Amber Brown is Not a Crayon book, saying how she was so sorry, that she didn’t mean to hurt me, and that she hoped I would forgive her one day in the future.  The ring was scotch-taped to the back cover.

She wrote letters to me constantly, with return addresses from all over the country.  Then postcards came from France and Italy, saying how she met this wonderful European man whom she fell in love with and was sure she was going to marry.  She hoped I would come to her wedding.  But a wedding invitation never came.  Luz’s last letter came from the southern part of Michigan, saying how the European man contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.

When I received that last letter, I put it away in a shoe box with all the other letters before driving little seven-year-old Lucy through the snow to school and helping Julia bring the groceries into our house.