Harrison Avenue // H.S.

The One

[Harry]

Elle once said that I am the romantic one, and she is the moody one.

This came with her attempt to assign us defining superlatives in our relationship. It was years ago now, and Elle was inspired after thumbing through an old yearbook that she pulled out to search for a funny picture of Matt. It was for his twenty-fifth birthday and he had insisted on having a 'roast' as the main event of his celebration. Ellison likes to give me the credit of being the one who is good with words and she doesn't always have the best track record, however, Elle's roast was easily the funniest of the night.

In the yearbook, Matt had earned two titles on the superlatives page. Most likely to stop and talk to twenty different people while walking down the hallway and most likely to be happy about rainy weather.

Elle earned the title of being most likely to start the revolution.

I thought it was fitting. She claimed that her classmates were a bunch of posers – minus Matt. He had always met Elle's qualifications.

At the time, I had wanted to sit with Elle and look through the rest of the book together, to catch glimpses of her life just before I had met her. I wanted to find pictures that maybe captured the angst she had pulsing through her teenage self. However, she insisted that she was barely pictured. In that moment, I figured this meant that she also had an embarrassing picture hiding inside.

I did go back to it on my own, only a week later, almost feeling like I was doing something forbidden. I searched through the pages, desperately looking for any sign of her. Mostly I found faces I didn't know. There were some that I recognized and names I had faint memories of. I mean, I did spend a summer in a house every Friday night with many of the people pictured in the yearbook. I didn't find any embarrassing pictures of her like I thought, and she hadn't exactly been lying to me either - she wasn't pictured much. There was her class picture and while she looked quite pretty, her smile reminded me of a version of Elle who didn't really know who she was yet. I also found a photo of her sticking her tongue out, the focus close and near her scrunched face, and the background of the gym behind her blurred out.

My favorite picture I found though was the one featured on the art page of the book. In the photo she is sitting in front of an easel, completely consumed by whatever it is she is painting, with a focused look that has become indicative of moments like this. Her hair was pulled out her face, in a messy up-do that seemed effortless. She was sitting on a stool, her legs a little spread as her feet rested on the bars beneath.

I think the thing I liked most was that it looked exactly like the Elle I first fell in love with, exactly like every early memory I have of her. And it was an image that I never felt brave enough to capture on my own that first summer we met. I can only imagine what her reaction would have been if I had pulled out my phone to take a picture of her while she was painting in her studio at her parent's house all those years ago.

So, I decided to take a picture of this picture that someone else had the luck of capturing. It was my lock screen for a year. Elle thought I was crazy.

When Elle assigned us our relationship superlatives it was almost a different time – before Dylanne, before we were married, before we lived a life even remotely close to the one we live now – and it all came from her procrastination to start her speech for Matt's roast.

According to her, I am the romantic one, she is the moody one. She is most likely to move to a different flat without telling the other, and I am most likely to come home with a cat. I am the outgoing one, and she is the one most likely to insult someone affectionately. She also gave herself the honor of being the one most likely to always have an awkward exit strategy to avoid any situation she deemed unpleasant. Emphasis on the awkward.