she woke me up at 9am on a saturday.
no warning. no negotiation. just “we’re going to la jolla. get dressed.”
i’ve been working on training her for 2+ years that saturday morning means i’m not a functioning human until at least 11. this lesson has not stuck. at this point i think she does it on purpose.
the plan i didn’t have #
she wanted to do the cove trail. the one that runs from la jolla village along the cliffs down to the children’s pool. she does it like twice a month. i’ve done it maybe 10 times total in my life.
i told her i was going to check the overnight crypto fills.
she picked up her phone. turned the screen toward me.
it was my grafana dashboard. BTC algo up 1.1%, ETH flat, options positions normal.
“nothing needs you right now.”
i hate that she knows how to read my dashboards. i hate it more that she’s always right about this.
la jolla in march #
the weather was doing its thing. march in san diego means it’s technically still winter and nobody told california. 71 degrees, no clouds, the coast doing that thing where it looks like a screensaver.
she wore white shorts and this hoodie she stole from my server rack room. she’s been claiming this hoodie as hers for like 18 months and at this point she’s right. it’s hers. whatever.
hair up. running shoes. moving at her morning-walk pace which is slightly faster than i normally walk for any reason at all.
i wore joggers and told her i was not hiking.
“it’s a walking path.”
“same difference.”
“it’s really not.”
the cove #
we walked for probably 45 minutes. the cliff trail has these lookout spots where you can see straight down into the water and when the light hits it looks unreal. dark blue to turquoise in like 50 feet.
sea lions on the rocks below. like 20 of them just stacked on each other doing absolutely nothing.
she narrates what they’re thinking. always has. the fat one on top was “living rent-free and not open to feedback.” the one on the edge was “one bad decision from disaster but committed to the bit.”
i pretended not to find this funny. i found it extremely funny.
somewhere around the halfway point she grabbed my hand. mid-sentence about the sea lions. just did it. no announcement.
the surprise #
okay so.
there’s a public restroom building near the main parking lot at the cove. it’s old, kind of concrete-brutalist, kind of ugly. we’d been walking a while and she said she needed to stop.
i went with her because same.
the parking lot at 10:30am on a saturday in march: essentially empty. too early for the tourist rush. a handful of cars, no one around.
she pushed me against the wall the second we were inside.
“it’s been on the list since the second time we came here,” she said after. “i’ve been waiting for the right conditions.”
we have done this trail probably eight times together. i had zero idea it was on the list. ZERO. she has been carrying this in her back pocket for two years.
“when did you decide this?”
“when we got engaged. i figured a public bathroom near the la jolla sea lions counted as a real location.”
i had my hand over her mouth the whole time so nobody outside would hear. she kept laughing at the worst moments which did not help.
best 20 minutes of my saturday by a significant margin.
the sea lions definitely didn’t notice.
food after #
she takes list achievements seriously. there has to be a food celebration after.
taco place in la jolla village. i got carnitas. she got a fish taco situation and, predictably, made me try a bite.
it was fine. objectively fine. the fish was fresh and the sauce was interesting and the texture wasn’t what i wanted.
“you liked it.”
“i didn’t say that.”
“your FACE.”
my face was completely neutral. i have resting poker face. she’s been misreading it for three years.
she texted her mom: “AK tried fish tacos. voluntarily-ish.”
her mom: three clapping emojis.
her mom and her younger brothers have been tracking my food progress since we got married. it’s a whole family thing now. there’s probably a group chat. i don’t want to know.
10 months #
we got home around 1. she sat at her desk to work on some project. i ran a quick scan on my options positions. normal afternoon.
ten months married.
i keep expecting it to feel dramatically different from before and it doesn’t, really. we already lived together for 18 months before the wedding. she already knew every annoying thing about me. i already knew about her bathroom schedule and the loud cooking music and the coffee mugs everywhere.
but there’s something settled in it that i’m still getting used to.
when she grabbed my hand on the cliff trail today, there was nothing uncertain about it. no “are we in a good place” reading. just: this is what we are. this is just us.
she planned a places list location two years in advance and waited for the right conditions. that’s who i married.
i’m so fucked. in the best possible way.
-AK