“You sound like a wild horse,” I said. “That’s what I am too.” But I felt a small twinge. I wasn’t sure if I still wanted to be a wild horse.
“To wild horses,” he said, lifting his cocktail.
“To wild horses,” I said, clinking my glass against his. It was the kind of night where everything else becomes two-dimensional, like the backdrop in old hand-drawn cartoons.
On our second date in as many days we went to the annual blessing of the commercial-fishing fleet at the boat harbor in Josh’s neighborhood. Then back to his house, where he said he was going to make me his favorite food: salmon dip.
“Smell,” he said, offering me the open can of smoked salmon in olive oil. The fish was from Kodiak Island, canned at the same cannery where Josh had grown up commercial fishing with his dad and where his dad had fished with his grandfather. Four generations of fishermen in the same family, plying the same Alaskan waters. The meat was smoky, briny, and rich and took me back to my summers fishing with my own dad, to a time when I wasn’t quite so scared of caring about anyone or anything.
Josh used the whole can of salmon and oil to make the dip: a rich red concoction dotted with chopped cornichons and streaked with mayo. We ate it on crackers standing at the counter in his kitchen. It was creamy and deliciously tangy but with a hint of woodsmoke and a soft bite of chile. It was better than anything I’d ever eaten before. I felt a pang. I did not want to love this man or his salmon, but this, I realized, was now outside of my control.
Three years later we got married on top of the hill at my family’s avocado ranch in rural Southern California. No one was more surprised than me. Josh and I stood under an old oak tree that had been ravaged by wildfire but was just beginning to leaf out again. It was September 2020, the middle of the pandemic and two weeks after my mom had died of pancreatic cancer. I was grief-stricken and horrifically sad. But by now I knew that allowing love into your life requires making room for loss too. You cannot have one without the other. Just like you can’t have happiness without sadness, often at the very same time. After we said our vows, we went back to the house and danced to the music of a local mariachi band while the bats came out in the darkening sky.
We served Josh’s salmon dip to our guests that night—a handful of our closest family and friends—scooping it up with hunks of fresh sourdough bread. And then we toasted. To how we’d caught one another when we didn’t expect it, and perhaps even when we hadn’t wanted to.
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