Fully Engaged

The most intimate moment of our engagement was in fact a few days before he proposed. 

We were driving back from Punta Cana along a highway which arches its back across the entire lower belly of the Dominican Republic. Although it is not the hilliest of places, you can see the dips and rises of the land as you glide upon that road, often the only car around since other cars that appear quickly pass and disintegrate within the next bend or twist a moment later. 

The sun was setting ahead of us and cast an incredible golden gleam across our path, predicative of the golden things to come. We had dined at a beautiful restaurant where they mistakenly served us (and charged us for) two Cuba libres, or coke with rum. Since his mother had called us that morning to say, “Be careful because I had a bad dream,” and because we both have seen the atrocities that occur when alcohol and driving are mixed together like rum and coke, we decided to play it safe and neither driver nor passenger drank. We instead ordered a bottle of Dasani water and did the classic Maryah-Don maneuver, chugging down the water and then pouring the alcoholic beverage into the remaining bottle, a gift for his father when we got home.

 

I was warm and fuzzy on the inside anyway--we had played in the sun all day, gone swimming, eaten amazing goat stew and a whole fried fish, and now returned eastward with stories from our day out.

Somewhere along the way, we began recounting the story of us starting at the very beginning--and two hours later--realized that we would need at least a 6 hour drive to get all the details in. He was the one responsible for the story telling, I simply interjected the occasional, “No, I think it was like this actually,” or, “And do you remember when that happened afterwards?” We laughed with the hilarious memories and grew somber when the hard parts were told, or when we remembered all the times that I called him in the dark, usually sitting on the bathroom floor because it was late and my tears would have woken up my siblings, so I would slip into the bathroom and there tell him some sort of mumble-jumble that I had translated in google-translate--which usually ended up making no sense. (The first time I needed to share my turbid emotions, I google translated the phrase, “I just really need to vent my troubles,” and though it translated okay, I butchered the pronunciation, leaving him clueless and myself in tears, till he finally said, “What’s wrong?” and I said, “I miss you.”).

Yet the lightheartedness of our story remains the overwhelming theme despite the trials, because through the entirety of it all, we are together--which is such an immense victory that neither of us can fathom it despite three years of living it.

I slipped my hand into his.

“I can’t believe how crazy it has been,” he said. “It truly is so beautiful,” I responded with a smile. I turned to look at him for a brief moment, dressed in a black shirt and jeans, his hair still looking good despite taking a dip into beachy, sandy water.

In that moment, there was no ring on my finger, no question had been popped, no relationship status had been changed. But we were engaged. And we have been engaged for all these years, because engagement is less about “right before marriage” and more about “this is how you live life.” You engage in conversation, you engage yourself in the trials, you engage yourself to hold up underneath the weight of burdens that fall upon you, you engage day in and day out to remain present, constant, and ever mindful of who this person is and how you can better love them.

From day one, he has engaged my soul. The first time I ever truly laid eyes on him enough to remember, enough to engage myself in the moment, he had a huge wooden pestle in his hands and was pummeling coffee beans within a mortar, singing some silly little song and doing some silly little jig that made me laugh. I didn’t understand Spanish at the time so whatever he was singing was lost on me, but I snapped a photo, his big, shining smile being what I most liked about it. From a photographer’s viewpoint, I thought he was rather cute and funny, but that’s all I thought and moved on from there to smell the coffee grounds: engaging all the senses.

And now I still snap photos of that large, infectious smile, I still laugh at his goofy little dances, and I still smell the coffee beans, freshly ground. I engage myself with him, just as he engages himself with me. So really, this engagement thing has been going on for a rather long time.

I have no intention of that stopping, because I believe that the day we stop engaging in each other is the day we lose the magic. When you lose engagement, you lose job satisfaction, you lose joy, you lose opportunities. Essentially, disengagement is equivalent to life getting down on one knee, offering you a million little breathtaking, heartbreaking moments of joy, and turning your back on the proposal. Disengagement is scarier than the risk of engaging. It is terminating the essence of being. 

I celebrate our engagement and I confess to many moments of documenting on the computer at work and pausing for a moment to lift my hand and marvel at the beauty of my diamond ring, but more than that, I celebrate engagement to life and engagement to the one who makes my life sparkle just like his smile does.

                                              

Eighty years after being married (might as well dream big), I pray that we are still 100%, all in, fully engaged. And in the meanwhile, as eager as I am to be united with him and no longer face a future of back and forth travels and long-distance phone calls, I am so very thankful that I can engage in what God has for me right now. I can engage myself with others, with those whom I care for at work, at home, engage myself with those who are misunderstood. 

I can engage myself with all that is in front of me, instead of taking the backseat and announcing that, since life isn't right where I want it to be at the moment, I might as well disengage till it gets there. Because the thing is: life won't ever "get there". It is already there. Whether or not I am there, present, and fully engaged, is the real question which my actions, choices, and life will answer.