My fiancée’s been hired by the women’s basketball team at Wake Forest University to give a motivational speech! Her first big money break since she left the medical field two years ago! She’s persevered through unemployment, depression, built a strong local reputation despite her fear of public speaking and I’m so proud! To help her practice, we’ve both gone full motivational speaker mode, from the moment I kiss her awake and leave for work to the moment we drift into our own dreamworlds, where our hopes and goals are born! We say everything JUST LIKE THIS! To our house plants! To our pimples! To each other! It’s like we can’t go back! She forgives my lack of communication! I forgive her lack of decision-making! We get to focus on the ways we make our hearts go BOOM! How she calls me amazing things in bed as her eyes spin in her head like slot machines that go JACKPOT! Our emotional intelligence is off the charts, our sexual intelligence is genius and our financials, when this fat university check clears, are going DUMMY! We’ll be able to afford the dream wedding she deserves! It doesn’t matter that tonight— at the thrift where we bought suitcases for our flight— she said this might not actually be the career path for her! I got so mad, it scared me a little! I screamed and screamed into a coat rack and still couldn’t speak to her! But, parked in front of our apartment, I pried out the words between sobs in the dark and between her own sobs she told me she understands! She knows how it is hard for me to express emotion but I’ve grown so much and she’s so proud! I told her I understand! ‘Cause this was her dream which she made come true and next week she’ll stand before those brave young women and tell them to try and fail! Keep failing! Look around at all these failures! Look at us! Look at the glory of true love which fails and fails and fails and fails and yet our kisses go WAKE UP! Or, our dribbles, in the case of Wake Forest women’s basketball! I’m not the motivational speaker! Neither is she! Not after next week and that’s okay! Tonight let’s make love and say, “don’t say anything!”