The obvious:
This is a (blurry) picture of Mark and I taken in my PU dorm room at Windsor Halls.
What you can’t see:
It was our sophomore year of college and on that day we had been dating for 5 months. Mark argued that while it was a special day, it was not an “anniversary” since the “ann” portion of that word implies “annual.” We celebrated anyway. He came from Chicago to spend the weekend with me. On Sunday (the day the picture was taken) we went to lunch at Applebee’s and then he had to drive home to get back for class. I had no idea what the future held for us when this was taken, but I was definitely in love and knew Mark was someone I wanted to keep around.
Just to the right and slightly above my head, there is some writing on the wall. It is the outline of a gun with “The Man” written next to it. Najla (my roommate) and I were pretty convinced there was a ghost living in our dorm room. We called him “The Man.”
We would come home and little things would be out of place, or we would be sleeping and our bathroom door would slam or the lights would randomly go on and off. To make matters worse (and encourage our ridiculous ghost theory), there was a shadow on the wall that looked exactly like a man holding a gun. After rearranging the furniture multiple times, we still couldn’t figure out what was casting the shadow. Again, we concluded it must be “The Man.” One less-than-sober night, Nej used a sharpie to outline the gun shadow on the wall and signed the drawing from “The Man.”
How this picture makes me feel:
Old, ridiculous, and happy. Old because my life has changed so much since that photo was taken in 2004. I feel like a different person. Ridiculous because we were out-of-control paranoid. THAT is why I can’t watch scary movies. Happy because falling in love with Mark was so much fun!
*Title of the post is a line from “In Color” by Jamey Johnson. Buy it here!