I was twenty-two. She was twenty. We were sitting on the Blue Stone in Bergen, talking about a future that was about to take her somewhere else.
She was planning to move to another part of the country to study. Three or four years. I had a job in the south, but little else that tied me to where I was. We were not officially a couple. Whatever existed between us had not become something we knew how to name.
At some point, she asked if I wanted to make a pact.
“What do you have in mind?” I asked.
If neither of us was married ten years from that day, she said, we would meet again at the same place, on the same date, and simply go and get married.
I said yes.
That would have been in 2007.
There was something very simple about the way she put it. Yet, in a way, she was asking me to marry her. There was an “if” in it, and ten years between the question and the wedding. But she had asked, and I had said yes.
We could leave, live our lives, and allow all those years to happen. Then, if neither of us had married, we would know where to find each other.
I have returned to that conversation many times. I still do not know exactly what the pact meant to her.
Perhaps it was a kind of safety net. The comfort of knowing that, if the lives we were heading towards did not turn out as we hoped, there was someone we could imagine coming back to.
Perhaps there was a question inside it that was easier to ask ten years into the future than in the present. Could you imagine choosing me? Could we still be possible, even after I leave?
Or perhaps it was a promise: I am willing to wait, if you are.
But one thing I did know: you do not ask just anyone to marry you, even ten years from now.
Sitting beside me, she had imagined a day when we might marry. And I had said yes.
I wonder about the distance between the future we could talk about and the present we left undecided.
I had a job. She had plans to study. Those things were real, but looking back, I cannot help wondering what might have been possible then. We had found a way to speak about marriage in ten years. Somehow, what we wanted from each other at twenty and twenty-two remained less clear.
The years passed. We did not meet there and marry in 2007. Our lives became what they became, through choices and circumstances that a conversation on a stone could not account for.
There is a particular sadness in remembering a future you once discussed with someone. You can picture it even though it never happened. The place is real. The person beside you was real. For a little while, the possibility belonged to both of you.
That conversation was not the end of our story. We stayed in each other’s lives, sometimes closely, sometimes at a distance. There were other conversations, other moments when a life together seemed possible. Those belong to a longer story.
But I keep returning to this one. I was twenty-two. She was twenty. We were sitting on the Blue Stone, and she asked if we would come back in ten years and marry.
I said yes.