“Did you mean it?” she said to me in such a tone that froze me to my very core. Those four words shook me more than anything I had ever said or anyone could ever say to me, so I thought. That tone, the kind you hear when you make someone cry for an over the top asinine thing that you blurt out without thinking. Everything that just came out of her mouth scared me more than when I said those three little words, that everyone fears saying for so many reasons, for the first time. 

 “Aaron! Did you fucking mean it?” She said it again; the additional expletive didn’t help my fear of what she said, or what I said. Her voice rattled the room, but even more than that, the whole apartment. It was a scary thought, having the rest of the complex, and therefore my only little piece of society, know that I had said something so catastrophically rash that my fiancee was screaming at me at the top of her lungs with tears in her eyes and emotion in her chest. Enough emotion of course to shake the windows, the doors, the floors and of course the walls. The shaking of the walls is what really did it, of course, just enough of an echo or a bounce to make me fear what could possibly happen next.

 ’Did I mean it’ was the question I kept asking myself. A constantly repeated phrase just running through my mind over and over again. Did I mean it? Just more and more of a spectator of my own life unraveling before my eyes. How could I say it, whether I meant it or not? How could I be so incredibly dull that I would allow those words to slip from my throat, past my teeth and between my lips, like a snake through a gap in a tree’s branches? A curse created by my own mind and sown by my own tongue.

 I am Aaron, and I fucked up monumentally tonight. To try to remedy this situation I tried to think of the good times her and I shared throughout our relationship and before it. That first night that we met came to mind. It always did during any sort of altercation between her and I, the simple time before we really knew each other. The night we met is a very, interesting story and that’s probably as good a place as any to start this tale.