LOVE IS A BIG DILL

At a wedding ceremony in Bakersfield or maybe way east in Waverly, a very straight couple is getting hitched and giggling through their vows. “I will always eat your pickle at the diner.” The crowd laughs. Grandma smiles. A toddler is peeing themself under a chair. Fitting, that at a truck stop breakfast in Michigan I had to ask my waitress for the pickle, notedly absent from my plate.

How improbable surely on the first date at the Satellite, he and I, a ruckus and an echo and ordering lunch after after the third round of drinks, I confessed to him, “I eat my pickles. I hope that’s okay.”

A cucumber takes seventy days to grow, but it only took me three hours on a vinyl bench to know I was stupid with love. The vinegar is an easy out for most. Me, underage in Seattle, but preening at the bar anyway. Jayde teeters to me, four shot glasses in her hands. “It’s a pickleback.”

Heard they sell pickles in movie theaters in Texas. Imagine, the crunches and dill dripping down the chin. Teenagers chomping gherkins to give sloppy Corrollas in the parking lot, butter still under their finger nails.

And in Clerks II, I learned about anal sex because my mom had to deftly explain pickle fucker to me, fourteen and unkissed.

But when the jar couldn’t be opened, no knife thwacking towel turning, my hand cramped, I called out his name and he appeared. And I didn’t know how to say thank you, but we interlocked our elbows, his forearm against mine, and he fed himself a pickle and I fed myself a pickle and we laughed so hard we dropped the jar.

We know that love is good, but we do not know what control it takes to leave the last one in the jar. Other than fatih, other than making sure everyone is eating before you sit down to the table.

On a homevideo, a couple is a chaos of laughter, their baby’s face wrenched sour as a small mouth spits out the pickle.

And this love, he once sang, “I have two pickles,” sitting across from me in a diner and I swelled with how ordinary it felt to be in love, drenched in my youth’s hope, there was before and after the whiskey. There was a cucumber, somewhere in Michigan, there is today a kitchen floor covered in pickle juice, there is a pregnant woman screaming about a midnight craving, and then there is a day I only know vaguely that we both discovered a shared love of pickles and it was wholly unremarkable.