Between J and K

In October, 1974, when I went to get my picture taken for the Gilroy High School yearbook, I barely knew Jennie Kajiko. We had some friends in common, might have exchanged some words when we sat near each other in Senior English, but that was about it. In the spring, though, when she came to my house to help with an editing session for the literary magazine (back when editing mostly involved scissors and rubber cement), things started to change. By the time the yearbooks came out, just about exactly forty years ago, we still hadn't done anything that could be called “dating,” but we were getting very creative at finding ways to spend time together. Which made it seem awfully significant when this is what appeared in our yearbook:

Significant to me, at least. Jennie, ever more realistic, saw it as nothing but an alphabetical accident. (She was far more concerned with the fact that they’d called her “Jenny.”) But I was determined to find meaning in it. 
       Some months later, in the sad but warm spell after we’d survived a few hard conversations and a near-breakup, I told Jennie that I had a very strong feeling about our future. I said that I had a feeling we might not always be together, we might even break up for long periods, but somehow I believed we would ultimately be together. Jennie found it a sweet sentiment but not a very realistic one, and I suspect she may have felt a bit confined by it. A joke seemed called for as an antidote to my overflowing romanticism, so I said something about how it must be true, because why else would we have been side-by-side in our yearbook? Underneath the joke, though, I think I sort of believed it.
       Clearly it was just the sort of thing an eighteen year old says, and clearly such things aren’t to be taken seriously. But forty years after that yearbook came out, here we are.

It hasn’t been an easy road. There’ve been hard times, and long times when our lives barely intersected. We’ve decided that the relationship was over more than once, most recently five years ago. But here we are still, or here we are again. And we’ve finally figured some big things out, learned how to make life together as good as we both want it to be. I’m not silly enough to try predicting the future anymore, but I don’t see this ending any time soon.
       I’ve mostly stopped thinking about that yearbook page. It was just a matter of alphabet, after all. We were in a small high school, and there happened to be no one named Judson or Kable to muscle between us. But if I were going to write a romantic story about a long, difficult, and ultimately wonderful relationship, and if I weren’t too worried about coming off as corny, it would be a great detail to use.