“In case you’ll be back for New Year’s, you’re more than welcome to come to the party,” she said as before she gave me a hug..
“Sure. Merry Christmas!” I said.
She walked me to the door, the way she always did and does: her head held high, and her gorgeous hair bopping with every step.
I walked to my car and switched the CD in the trunk of my BMW to Manic Street Preachers and turned up the volume of my car stereo. Then I drove toward the ferry terminal, and headed over to Finland.
It was the beginning of a new millennium, Stockholm was gearing up to leaving the 20th century behind to the tunes of Europe playing “Final Countdown” on a bridge that had been built across the bay in the city, just a couple hundred meters from the office she and I worked in.
We both knew I would definitely be back for a New Year’s party with her. Not because I wanted to see Europe (the band), or the fireworks in the Stockholm sky and unsurprisingly, when the clock struck midnight, I was in Sollentuna, listening to Gyllene Tider.
I was with her.
Of course I was going to come back for New Year’s. After all, I was in love.
I often wonder what it is that makes some moments stick to your mind and never leave, even when they don’t seem even remotely important at the time. And a lot of times they aren’t.
Even today, when I think back at those early days in September, when we had just met – but not “met” – the one image that comes back to me is simply her walking past my desk towards the office elevator, not even looking at me.
I remember admiring the way she carried herself, her posture, simply her way to be her.
By the time it was time to plan for New Year’s, we had gone from my admiring her from a distance to chatting to sending each other hundreds of emails to walking around Stockholm being to being secretly a couple to being busted as the secret couple to celebrating my birthday together to driving around, listening to music to becoming us.
There was Y2K, Yeltsin stepping down and some guy named Putin taking over, and there was the dotcom boom. The clocks were going to stop, computers crash, and planes get stuck in the air.
Yet, here we are.
Not that we really cared. We had other things in mind.
We moved in together, and then we moved together. We’ve got one child, and then another, and somewhere in between, we moved again. We’ve watched hundreds of movies – and thousands of episodes of Columbo – together. We’ve seen the kids start school and graduate from school, we’ve seen them perform in front of big and small audiences, always standing in the crowd, feeling proud. We’ve gone skating, hiking, snorkling, and we’ve been on a reading retreat. We’ve driven across America three times, around the British Isles twice, once around Ireland, taken a lap around the Yucatan peninsula, and we’ve looked for the former Nintendo headquarters in Kyoto.
One New Year’s night I proposed to her so awkwardly that she had to ask me if I was proposing to her, but I said I was and she said yes, so we flew the our families to Vegas to watch us walk down a short aisle and say I do. One time we were on a ferry to Sweden and watched balloons float down from the ceiling, and another year, we headed toward the Senate Square in Helsinki, but realized it was freezing cold and turned around before midnight.
So, yes, I did make sure I was going to be in Stockholm for the big Millennium New Year’s Eve. Who knows, maybe – probably – we’d be welcoming the new year together for the 26th time even if I hadn’t, but I’m glad I came back.
As I drove out of the ferry, I headed straight toward the Old Town subway, and picked her up. We drove to my small apartment on the south side of town, and we watched the TV broadcast of the world waking up to a new century, until it was time to head over to the party she had invited me to.
The party of my life.