I’m in the bedroom, about to begin one of my exercise routines. I’m holding a jump rope in the ready position. K is in bed with her binky (iPhone).

Me: I hate my life. Help me make this fun.

K: You can pretend you’re someone else.

Me: Someone happy?

K: Yeah.

Me: Who?

K: Stephan.

Me: Who says Stephan is happy?

K: Well, he has nice hair.

Last night, as we lay in bed, K said she would kill all the angry and stupid people for me.

I asked her, “Sweetie, will you kill all the angry and stupid people for me?”

“Yes,” she said, without looking up from her binky¹.

Sometimes I ask her ridiculous, impossible questions, because it seems a funny thing to do. Recently she’s taken to answering yes to whatever I ask, to try to get me to stop bothering her.

I think this is what love is like.

1. “Binky” is K’s name for her smartphone. It’s a word from her childhood. It means pacifier.

Today is the tenth anniversary of my first date with K. I’m not entirely sure how this happened. Ten years ago I went on a date with a woman named K, and when it was over I asked to see her again. Then we had a second date, and a third, and so on, and now today is ten years of one day following the next with this one woman, K.

I don’t believe there’s a word for the kind of disorientation I feel. K says, only half-joking, that there must be one in German.

In the simplest sense I know exactly what happened. But those are merely the facts of the case – one day followed the next, and so on. At the same time there’s another, deeper sense in which the facts are besides the point.

Whenever I fly cross-country, there’s always that befuddling moment when I suddenly find myself several thousand miles from where I woke that day.

Sometimes when K and I are talking, I try to retrace how we arrived at the current subject. Rarely do I manage it.

But then, really, what does it matter? We arrived.