Don't Forget To Remember

Someday we will drink here. The bus to downtown will be too full and we'll resolve that we don't want to really see the Tower of London anyway. It's such a downer. I'll jot down some notes about a story tentatively called "The Crown Jewels," or "William Wallace's Balls," and you'll laugh about the latter and about something I said about the rude bartender who called us yanks in such a way. An elderly lady will love your coat and engage you in conversation. You, polite to a fault, will stay at the bar with her and I'll go play darts with some local blokes, one who looks like Austin Powers and who makes you laugh when you look back at us. And we will get drunk on Irish whisky. I will get drunk, anyway. 

Then I'll lose our train and ferry tickets somehow, so we'll take a cab to the train station and buy other tickets back to Ireland where we are staying in a bed and breakfast above a pub where a family is playing music. It will rain on the way back. We will make love on the train. Then in the pub by a warm fire, as the younger of two girls sings a Cranberries song for the tourists, I will ask you to marry me, even though we are already married. It is something you're used to me asking you. I will tell you that once wasn't enough, and one lifetime isn't enough either. I'll give you an emerald ring and tell you it is a natural emerald, which you can tell because it is a cloudier shade of green. It is less brilliant, they say. You already know all this, but you smile and flatter me the way you do. I bought it in a pawn shop, which you know as well, but you don't care.  It only makes it all the more interesting. 

And with our mortality in question, saddened at the prospect of that inevitable shepherd, we will gather a witness and make a solemn pact there in that pub, in writing, to meet after death there as ghosts and continue our love affair, which was in danger of bankruptcy and many other silly things, but never of being broke of passion or of being dull. I never bored you with tedious talk of work and you never bored me with incessant complaints of your family or the one ex who tried to pocket all of your soul he could because nothing else really mattered. And at some point in the night in our candlelit room, in the wee hours after making love again, you will say, more than a little drunk and sore, "God save the Queen," and we will laugh and then fall asleep. 

I will never forget, though it has yet to occur. You will not remember that once I wrote this or else you would have playfully called me a prognosticator because you like to say such words. Maybe, your memory being as it is, you'll think that I said to meet in the English pub so you'll sit at the bar and wait, looking back at the dart board for a yank such as me. But I'll be waiting in that Irish one, by the hearth for you. So please, don't forget to remember.