1992.

1992. San Jose, California.We were surviving on little more than cigarettes and moonlight, putting together just enough money each month for our shitty little upstairs apartment, looking out over the ugliest ghetto; nothing to see but concrete and piss-stains. With nothing to eat but coffee for the third day straight, I think it's safe to say I was dying. She was gone and with her the money, while I was left rotting alone in the darkness. In the sunlight. It was then that I realized she was the only thing keeping me alive, the only thing I could honestly say I wanted in life; without her, i couldn't even be bothered with food. Lying spreadeagle on the bed, arms aching, my whole body giving off a pale shaking pain, I wondered how my life had sunken into this and started tracing back the steps from my solitary starvation.

It wasn't exactly the most romantic of meetings. Stumbling drunk in a house I didn't recognize, I was looking for a bathroom. After however many minutes of futile search, I had resigned myself to pissing in the carpeted hallway when a door opened and out walked Angie. Her eyes were rolling on ecstasy, a half grin on her face when she saw my pants down and all of a sudden she's pulling me through the doorway and into the bathroom. In less than thirty seconds we were fucking, me lifting her up onto the sink and pushing every bit of myself into her while she tore at my shirt, reached for the light switch, biting her lips and hitting her palms against the tile counter. Mouth open without words. When she finally came she pushed against me so hard that I fell back and cut myself on a metal towel rack. You can still see the scar along my shoulder blade. If there were any parting words I don't remember them and I woke up in the bathtub the next morning with my dick hurting and her phone number written across my stomach in lipstick.

But the image from that party paints an unfair picture of my life at that point: I was still holding down my day job at a screenprinter's and making enough at that to afford my own place in the nicer part of the West End, with enough left over to put gas in my car. I called her the very next day.
"Hey, this is Thomas, you uh wrote your number on my stomach last night? I'm sorry, I didn't really catch your name."
"Oh yeah? Well, I don't really remember you asking for it either. I wasn't sure if thats what you were interested in."
"I mean..."
Her voice sounded like still-fresh tattoo ink. I imagined her lying down on a table, a buzzing needle to that soft white skin. I was fumbling my words.
"It's just, I guess, it all happened so fast"
I heard her take a bite out of an apple, a really crisp one. Maybe a Granny Smith, I thought. Or a Macintosh.
"Hey, are you eating a green apple?"
"Yeah, I am actually. Do you want one?"
"Umm... sure?"
"Alright then, come over here. I live at 1325 Kenney, right by the Central City Fire Station."

She moved in with me the very next week. Not that moving in was a huge ordeal, the house at 1325 had been her brother's and all she'd had there was two paper suitcases and maybe 35 books.
"And before that?"
"Before what?"
"I mean, where were you staying before your Brother's place?"
"Oh I'd been at a boyfriend's who one day thought it would be fun if he started hitting me when he got drunk. So pretty quickly i figured that out and packed my shit up to move in with Tim."
"Your brother."
"Yeah, exactly. Hey, does your building recycle?"

Those first six months were glorious, maybe the best of my whole life. We would wake up together and she would kiss me all over as I made us breakfast, as I put my clothes on for work, still kissing me as I walked out the door,
"Hey, I think you should come home on your lunch break and fuck me."
We spent every waking moment together, learning eachother in every way possible, falling in love in eachother's eyes and lips and minds, thinking about nothing else but our romance. I'd come home from work to find her naked on the floor in the sun, an angel, painting with watercolors or reading a book from the library. She made her money doing odd jobs in 1,000 different places; everything from sorting recycling to answering telephones at radio stations.
"And it's all 100% under the table, I'm on nobody's payroll, stuck to nobody's schedule. Any day I can walk away from all of it and just leave, I'm responsible to nobody. Except for you of course" she said, kissing me on the forhead.
But where would she go?

When the summer came she told me she wanted to take an extended trip up to Washington.
"It's so beautfiul this time of year, the sun raining through the trees, and I have alot of friends up there who we could stay with for free. They'd probably even feed us."
My boss at the screenprinter's told me there was no way I could take 3 1/2 months off work and expect to come back to a job so I quit right there and told him to mail my last check to Seattle.
"Don't worry about it baby, we're going to make it work no problem."
and I believed her. Honestly had faith that our love was going to be the only thing we needed, packing my furniture into my parent's garage and driving north on the interstate, holding hands.