What defines love in a modern-day relationship? Making dinner unexpectedly or bringing home some when the fridge is empty? Maybe it’s assembling your IKEA desk without even having to be asked? Letting the bathroom garbage overflow with stained menstrual paraphernalia without as much as a snide remark? All these signs can point to love, and would net my recommendation if not admiration. But none of these items has come close, not even remotely close, to what I recently experienced.
It started off as your average Sunday. My boyfriend, Nick, and I had just moved into a new apartment and we were painting the bedroom. It was a nice midnight blue that I picked out. We had just taken a break and Nick had my phone, my, ahem, iPhone in his shirt pocket after briefly borrowing it to look up the hours of operation of Home Depot.
“Closed. Too bad.” We’d have to go in the morning.
“Got to get back to work.” He announced reluctantly. “I want to finish the wall before 10.”As he leaned over to pick up the paint roller my eyes fixed on the beautiful shiny silver technological wonder in his shirt pocket. The same little wonder that I had come to love in a way that I had never experienced with an inanimate object before. My iPhone, my baby, was slipping. It was slipping out of Nick’s shirt pocket heading directly towards the can of midnight blue paint.
The horror! The absolute midnight blue horror!Time seemed to slow down, the adrenaline started to flow, my fight-or-flight reflexes kicked into overdrive. But alas not even Super Woman reflexes could have prevented what happened next. Gravity won. My precious baby fell straight from Nick’s shirt pocket into the can of midnight blue paint with a sound mimicking my sinking heart.
“Plop, plop, plop.”
What happened next is blurry. But when I came to, what I saw was so beautiful, such an honest act of love and devotion, that I almost cried.
My boyfriend was performing CPR on my iPhone. Initially, I was horror struck, as any sane, non-paint sucker would be. But my shock and concern quickly turned to acceptance and from acceptance came a stranger feeling. We don’t have kids or dogs or even fish, I thought. Instead we have our iPhones and our Blackberries, and our mp3 players. Call it shallow, call it obnoxious, call it what you will, but these are the things that we love the most so it would only make sense that when my iPhone fell into the paint he would do all he could to reverse the damage.
So instead of yelling, “Stop, what are you doing! Don’t eat the paint, its poison!” I opted for “Suck!” “Keep sucking! Suck it all out!” “Suck until there’s nothing left!”
“I’m trying!” he gasped back between breaths. “I’m trying the best I can!”
It was too soon to tell if it was all for nothing. But it didn’t matter. His act of bravery and loyalty under fire was what mattered. And even if my iPhone didn’t survive I knew that our love in the wireless age would. #
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