you're gonna miss this

This is the time in my life where I lived in the Big City, spent many evenings cooking dinner and studying and messing around on the computer, and went to a lot of bars to drink a lot of beer. This is the time of my life where I was a newlywed who felt like an old hand at my relationship with T. It's the time when we talked about 401ks and career trajectories, down payments and family planning, but it was all non-committal and blessedly rhetorical. This is when we lived on one income and our greatest hope was T getting a promotion and his department not getting shut down. It's when I tried to go to the gym to stay in shape because it was free, but I rarely actually followed through. It's when I spent entire afternoons in a library with other 20- and 30-somethings excited about the law, not jaded or overworked from years of practice, even though we all pretended we were. It's when I watched a lot of television on the internet, and T was obsessed with his Netflix queue. It's when the dog was decidedly past puppyhood but not yet an old man dog. When my parents and T's parents lived back in VA and we all looked for opportunities to see one another, but those opportunities were fewer and farther between than we would've hoped. This is the time in my life where I lived in a tiny, firetrap apartment full of dog hair and furniture and casebooks and zines, and not much else. Where we could walk to the grocery store or the park, to a diner or the train station, downtown or to a friend's house, without even breaking a sweat. Where life was everywhere around us all the time, in a loud, noisy, gritty way. It's the time in my life when I was 28 and in my first year of marriage, second year of law school and completely fascinated with trying to figure out what comes next.