I wanted to chew your cheeks the moment I saw you. By the time you sat down I was already yours. By the end of creative nonfiction class my love was cemented. When you didn’t return to the literary center the next week, I blamed myself. The next month, when we bumped into each other at the Woodland Art Fair, I swear I caught you checking me out. Two months after that, when we crossed paths on North Limestone, your seeking smile, trying to find my eyes when I was focused on the sidewalk, almost knocked me over. When my essay from class was accepted for publication, you were the only person I wanted to tell.

When I gathered the guts to ask you out my email was so full of explanations and feints (“started a new job and would love to connect”, “any interest in joining my writing group?”) that when we finally met for coffee neither of us were sure if we were on a date.

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I was late, and embarrassed for being late, so instead of standing in line to order a drink I sat with you for an hour with nothing in front of me but hope. You let me walk you back to work, and hugged me tight enough that I knew I’d see you again.

It wasn’t very much longer, in the galactic scheme of things, before we were both of us in love. But before we loved each other, we had to kiss. You leaned in. I was terrified. I wanted our first kiss to be lyrical and romantic. So I said, “I have sushi breath.” And you said, “I don’t care.” And we kissed.

At the start of Lessons (S6E19) Captain Jean-Luc Picard was not looking for love when he went to astrometrics, any more than I was looking for love when I went to writing class at the learning center. But by the time he was sipping her tea (no entendre intended) Picard was lightyears beyond smitten with Commander Nella Darren, and dangerously close to in love.

You went to Europe and brought me back tea and the instructions on the tea say to use freshly boiled water and “Allow one teaspoon per cup of water, plus one teaspoon for the pot.” I’d never heard of the “one for the pot” rule, and some brief research showed that, while it is a popular practice amongst British tea enthusiasts, not everyone can agree on its purpose. Some say the extra teaspoon is to guard against weak tea, when making a pot to share. Others view it as a more generalized offering to the Tea Gods, a sacrifice of leaves thanking the pot for its service, or, as most adherents suggest, simply tradition.

Lessons
Pour deep, Spout of Love;
run my cup o'er with your brew,
sweet, strong, worth sav'ring.
Sip slow, and say honestly:
What need has Love, of weak tea?

Unfortunately, I was a boy in high school in 2004, and as such was required to be obsessed with poker. The other boys and I would play Texas Hold ‘Em on Friday nights, losing the same ten bucks to each other back and forth for hours, over cheese pizza and Mountain Dew. When I first read “plus one for the pot” I thought of the ante, the money you pay to play the game, the investment you risk losing, but without which you will gain nothing.

It’s been a year now, the first of many, and I wonder. When you cook dinner for me, when I make breakfast for you, when we work to make the other’s life a little more livable, when we (as you say) “cosplay marriage” — I think of this as the plus one to our pot. But is it a sacrifice? An offering? A gamble? An accidental adherence to heteronormative tradition? Or is it a way to kiss without the risk of fish breath? A way to love the whole of each other - a way to be whole, together, like the tea and the water and the pot? A way (the only way?) to avoid weak tea.