Page 37 of Untangled
Is there anything better than the smell of fresh cookies? Maybe the soft snores of a sleeping baby on the monitor, a dusting of snow on the trees, and the eager hands of a handsome man pulling me to the couch while they bake.
“This might be my favorite prompt yet,” I say as I slip under Daniel’s arm and pull my feet underneath me.
“Better than yesterday?” he replies. “Because yesterday was pretty incredible.”
“I’m starting to think each day is my new favorite. It just keeps getting better.”
“Tomorrow? Even better yet,” he replies.
Day 24
Write a list of 10 prompts each to complete in the future.
Shards of wrapping paper, shiny and half-torn, cover the living room floor and stick to my thighs whenever I change positions. How is it that scissors and scotch tape disappear when it’s time to wrap gifts, when you know you have multiples of each somewhere in the house? It leaves Daniel and I stealing them back and forth as we scramble to wrap Violet’s presents before the big reveal inthe morning.
“You know this is dumb, right?” I say to him as I fold a neat crease and tape it on the side of a brand-new picture book. “Vi is going to care more about crumpling the paper and playing with the boxes than she is the toys. We could’ve saved so much time and money. Wrapping paper, cardboard, and a fake tv remote, and she would’ve been thrilled.”
He tosses a balled-up wad of paper over my head to the trash pile. “But isn’t this part of the fun?I’mhaving fun.”
“I’mgetting paper cuts,” I reply, a chuckle tumbling from my lips.
“Want to take a break for the last card?” he asks, stopping his work with a cardboard tube in one hand a pair of scissors open in the other.
“I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. I’m nervous, almost. What if we wrap up the experiment and the magic leaves? I don’t want to stop feeling like this.”
“Then we’ll start the whole thing over. Amorous Advent can become…” he thinks for a minute before a devious smile graces his face. “Juicy January and Flirtatious February.”
“Oh my god, you did not just sayJuicy January.” I accompany the reply with a gag, and his lips rise further, the apples of his cheeks on full display.
“You know what I mean!” he says. “We can keep this thing going. That’s what we decided, right? We’ll keep doing this.”
With a quick dart into the kitchen, Daniel returns with the deck. It’s not the nice, smooth rectangle it was twenty-four days ago—some cards are bent, others stick outhaphazardly. It’s the living embodiment of our effort, imperfect but complete.
“Yessss,” he says as he reads the day’s prompt. “Grab a scrap of paper. We’re coming up with our own ideas.”
I take the card from him and my eyes linger on the words. I guess it really is up to us now.
He finds the pens buried under a stack of to-and-from labels and hands one to me. Armed with a very jolly and not-so-wrinkled piece of reindeer paper with white on the back, I start to draft my list. The words flow quickly, much more fluidly than I expect. With each new idea, excitement tightens against my ribs:
Go to a bar and do trivia
Discuss ways to hold each other accountable to our goals
Visit an adult shop together and buy each other something
