An afternoon that brought us back

The man in this photo is my husband now, but when this picture was taken, we weren’t married yet. Back then, both of us were unbelievably busy. He was constantly working late, and I always seemed to have something from work that still needed to be finished. We saw each other every day and slept in the same bed every night, but somehow, we were spending less and less time actually sitting down and talking. Sometimes we would come home, ask each other, “How was your day?” get a quick “Fine,” and then one of us would go back to answering emails while the other lay on the couch scrolling through their phone. After a while, I started having this strange feeling that even though we were physically so close, we were almost living two completely separate lives.

Then one day, on my way home from work, I passed a small shop and saw a 1,000-piece puzzle. The picture was of a little seaside town, and the colors were beautiful. I honestly don’t know why, but I suddenly felt like buying it.

That weekend, for once, neither of us had work calls or last-minute meetings. When he saw me dump all the puzzle pieces onto the table, he laughed and said, “A thousand pieces? You really think we’re finishing this today?” I told him I had no idea, but we weren’t going anywhere anyway.

At first, we were very serious about it, separating the colors and sorting out the sky, the buildings, and the water. Then at one point, we spent almost ten minutes on the floor looking for one blue piece. He kept insisting that I must have lost it, and in the end, we realized it had been underneath his leg the whole time. We laughed about that for way too long.

The funny thing was, the longer we worked on the puzzle, the more we started talking. Neither of us tried to force a conversation, and nobody said, “We need to talk.” I told him about something at work that had been bothering me, and for the first time, he really opened up about how much pressure he had been under.

Then we started talking about what kind of house we might want someday, whether we would have a big wedding if we ever got married, and we even argued for a few minutes about whether we should have a dog or a cat in our future home.

By the time we looked up again, the light outside had completely changed. An entire afternoon had passed without us even noticing.

When we finally put in the last piece, we both went quiet for a few seconds. Then, for some reason, we were ridiculously happy, like we had just accomplished something much bigger than finishing a puzzle.

So we propped up the phone and took this picture together.

Looking back now, I honestly can’t even remember what happened to that puzzle afterward, but I still remember that afternoon.

I eventually realized that what I miss most was never the thousand puzzle pieces. It was the fact that we finally put down our work and our phones, sat beside each other again, and slowly pieced together all the things we had stopped saying out loud.