It was at the beginning of our relationship, so the year was 2006— four years ago and some change. He and I were saying good night. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this, but I was buzzing— my skin, fingers, heart, and head. Excitement of simple grazes and glances sprang from my ulna to my uvula and ricocheted to my patella. We quietly walked up the stairs, whispering in conversation then whispered our goodbyes. The only way to exit the house is the garage door, which was closed. He whispered to me that I needed to press the button to open the garage, and a combination of tactile memories firing and absolute necessity for silence made me a bit slow. Okay, in full disclosure, I was love-flustered. That’s right. You see, there is no room in a love-flustered mind for logic. Thinking through distracts from tracing every touch and word exchanged over the course of an evening spent watching a movie then talking afterward. Any thought that falls out of this train must be rushed past in order to get back on track. When the thought, “Hm. I guess they wired their own garage for electricity,” crossed my mind, I should have heeded the warning signs, should have recognized the idiocy. Even if this family had wired their own electricity, why on Earth would they put the garage door button by the door jamb and the doorbell further up and away on the wall? The why didn’t have a chance of crossing my mind then. As I mentioned before, I was quite love-flustered. I even tried to press the button quietly, ready to run like an antelope, gracefully and safely out to my car. I pressed the button with my buzzing, love-flustered finger and immediately felt a steady surge of heat rise into my lungs and face and simultaneously felt all of my organs drop five inches as the doorbell rang throughout the entire house of this sleeping family. I gave our position away:  We were awake at four o’clock in the morning and now they were, too Oh, I could have died on the doorstep in the garage that night— never to make another step and, more importantly, never to make another sound.

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His face. His charming, wonderful face which was in large part to blame for the buzzing, being distracted, and the love-flusteredness, looked at me as if to say, “Why on Earth did you just do that?” I am sure the only thing he could read from my face was complete mortification. I pressed the actual garage button as quickly and quietly as I possibly could and in a split second even tried to take back any time that I possibly could just to prevent The Noise. Feeling melty from pure embarrassment and horror, I got in my car and smiled a very sleepy smile. Although he and I talked late into the night, I found myself ecstatic because tomorrow peeked its head from around the corner brimming with promises of getting to see and talk to him again. I hoped I would get to see him. However, I clung to the very real possibility of dying of complete organ failure due to melting. That’s right. I had already figured out my hypothetical cause of death: Sheer Mortification.