The Life Intended by Kristin Harmel

before dropping everything we were doing and heading for the bedroom. There were a thousand words between us that spoke volumes, but I can’t think of a single one that Dan and I share.
    I don’t even know the stories of Dan’s childhood, the things that shaped him. I don’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up, or what his school social life was like, or what books and movies he liked as a boy. Yet I can still name Patrick’s elementary-school best friend, tell the tale of the day he got into a fight in seventh grade defending a girl he had a crush on, and recite a list of his career aspirations in chronological order from garbage man to astronaut to chef to pilot to financial analyst.
    Does the fact that I don’t know those kinds of things about Dan mean that something’s broken between us? Or is it just a logical result of beginning to date when we were older, at a time in our lives when childhood felt further away?
    “What were you like in high school?” I ask almost desperately as Dan sits down at the table a few minutes later. He’s wearing pajama pants and a T-shirt, and he smells like soap.
    He takes a bite of pasta and a sip of wine before answering. “I don’t know. The same as I am now, I guess. Why?”
    “I just feel like I don’t know about your past as much as I maybe should.”
    “Okay,” he says, giving me a strange look.
    “So tell me about it,” I say. Maybe I can use the shreds of information he gives me to patch the holes I’m beginning to see between us. “Your past, I mean.”
    “You’re acting weird.”
    “Just humor me.”
    He shrugs. “All right. School was never really an issue. I always did well. I played soccer in junior high and football in high school, so I was always pretty popular. Never really had any problems with the other kids. I was actually the prom king. Haven’t I told you that before?”
    I ignore the question, because in fact I’ve heard it at least a dozen times. “But there had to have been a time when you struggled,” I protest. “A time when you were bullied, or when you were sad, or when you just had a bad few months.”
    “Not that I can recall.” He looks at me more closely. “Why? Were you bullied?”
    “No,” I say, suddenly desperate to share. “But I had rough patches in school. Fifth grade, for example. We’d just moved to a new school district, and all the kids in my class wore designer clothes and arrived in their parents’ expensive cars. I took the bus, and my favorite outfit was a Superman T-shirt and polka-dot skirt, which I wore all the time. I got made fun of a lot that year.” I smile, intending for the words to be funny, but he just looks confused.
    “But why would you keep wearing something that made you the butt of jokes?” Dan asks, taking another bite of his pasta.
    I stare at him. “I was just being myself,” I say. “And I was ten. What did I know about fashion?”
    “Just strikes me that it would have saved you a lot of trouble if you just tried to fit in,” he says with a shrug. “But maybe I’m not getting it. Why are you telling this story, anyway?”
    “I don’t know,” I say in a small voice. “I just thought it would be nice to learn a little more about each other.”
    He shrugs and goes back to eating, but I’ve lost my appetite. I pick at my food and try not to think about the fact that when I told Patrick about my fifth-grade fashion sense and the trouble it caused, he came home from work the next night with a Superman T-shirt for me. This is to remind you that you should never stop being yourself, no matter what, he’d said. Because I think you’re the most incredible person in the world.
    T hat night, Dan sits in the living room and answers e-mails while I take my laptop to bed and once again google American Sign Language. When Dan comes to bed just past 10:30, he walks in on me signing the sentence I love you more than you can imagine.
    “What are you doing?” he asks.
    “Nothing,”