How I Met My Wife… Twice

Maybe she doesn’t want me to tell this story.

I picked out a blue coin purse small enough to fit in the palm of an adult hand.

The gift featured all shades of blue, some red for balance, and “Greece” in gold thread.

Strolling around the lovely town of Chania, I wished I were spending Christmas with her. At least it was Catholic, not Orthodox, Christmas, so the Greeks weren’t in the full swing of celebration yet.

Back in my hotel room, I spent the holiday with a bottle of local beer and re-runs of Mexican telenovelas. I no longer remember whether they were dubbed or subbed.

Her favorite color was blue. All shades.

More than a month ago, we had sat at a café at the 28 May Mall. The hour was too late for caffeine, even decaf. Not that I needed any more adrenaline shooting through me.

“Why did you come all the way to Azerbaijan from California?” she asked me, her fingers wrapped around her berry smoothie.

“For you,” I said, switching on my most charming smile as if the seven-thousand-mile journey from Los Angeles to Baku were a distance I traversed every weekend.

“Come on, I don’t believe you. We are not children.”

A month passed, and our school break began. I went on holiday to Athens and a couple of Greek islands (literally two: Crete and Santorini) while she revisited Prague with her mom. We were like a jet-setting couple. But were we a couple?

Years before I became a traveling teacher, I was a traveling student. Friends often asked me which countries I wanted to visit most. I had a list of four, Greece among them.

On the plane to Greece, a destination that had dominated my dreams since fifth grade, when my teammates and I named our group the Centaurs because the Minotaurs were taken, again and again I thought to myself, “This trip is going to keep me away from her for two weeks. Two whole weeks.”

In the weeks preceding the two-week break from school, again and again, I thought to myself, “It’s half a decade too early for me to meet someone who makes me feel this way. I still have too many places to explore.”

A week after we returned to work, we ate dinner again at Cinnabon. I gave her the gifts from Greece: a coin purse and a scarf. As I stepped into my apartment, where I lived alone, I received a long text message from her. The key information: “I think we should just be friends.”

The key was serrated, and it twisted as it plunged inside me.

The tears cracked my face and my voice.

The next day at school, my students asked me if I was ill. Not ill, children, I wanted to tell them. Sick. Heartsick.

After the cracks began to seal, I summoned the courage to visit her classroom on Valentine’s Day. Later that day, she texted me, “Thank you for your visit. I did not expect it.”

On International Women’s Day, she wore the blue scarf from Greece. The cracks healed further.

A month later, I accepted her invitation to attend her art exhibition. She ignored me throughout the event. I wanted to find out why. I was not subtle. The next day, she sent me an even longer text message, pleading with me never to speak with her again.

Before I left Baku for good (or so I thought), we met one last time at Vapiano, her favorite Italian restaurant. After a short holiday in Turkey, she possessed skin kissed by the Mediterranean sun.

She was more beautiful than anyone I had seen during my own vacation in Germany, France, Belgium, and Hungary. She ate a Greek salad. I drank a Belgian wheat beer. She wanted to split the salad. I had no appetite. Her hand brushed mine as we parted ways.

To my surprise, we kept in touch. Daily.

I was to embark on a yearlong backpacking trip in Latin America. After the first month, she wrote to me, telling me we must stop because we had no future. I trudged along my journey during the second month, finally flying from Mexico City to Bogota.

After the third month, I went back home, after exploring only two of the ten countries on my list. An ocean could not tear my thoughts away from her.

Traveling to escape your feelings is a foolish venture. You must carry them with you everywhere you go.

I took a job in Shanghai because her brother lived there. We scheduled to meet when she visited him. We did not.

While I lived in Moscow, a city close enough to Baku that an accidental sighting would not be outside the realm of possibility, she contacted me out of the blue. Her name shot adrenaline through me. I did not reply generously.

Time does not heal all wounds, but it does change them.

Half a decade after my residence in Baku, living together in Suzhou, a city next to Shanghai, my wife and I sat in our bedroom. She brought something out of her bedside drawer.

“I kept it,” she said.

It was a blue coin purse small enough to fit in the palm of an adult hand.

It had all shades of blue, some red for balance, and “Greece” in gold thread.

Dash Ip wonders why his wife wouldn’t want him to tell this story. Maybe she wants him to stick to his novels.