Jason Permenter

REASONS I LOVE HER # 12956

Anna lives eight hours ahead of me. It means she’s usually falling asleep about the same time I’ve nearly finished digesting my lunch. While helping some friends move furniture today (and well past the time she should’ve been asleep), I started receiving emails from Anna. One after the other, each entitled The Use of Poetry. Thirteen emails in all, arriving over the next hour and a half.

The only text in any of the messages was in the very first: “Story from the New Yorker that I’ve been wanting to read to you.” In each of the messages to follow was a short recording of her reading aloud from a wonderful short story, by Ian McEwan, about a physics student who pursues a woman named Maisie at Oxford in the 1960s. Forty minutes of her reading aloud, from beginning to end.

I know I write about Anna a lot. I know. And I gush and gush. I know. I’m in love, for goodness sake. I’m admittedly absolutely crazy about her, in the very most sane of ways. And yes, I consider myself hopelessly lucky. I don’t deserve her. So I hope you’ll forgive me for sometimes having to say it all out loud, often at the top of my lungs. But things like recordings of her reading a story she thinks I might just enjoy, from 8 hours in the future, half a world away, mean far more to me than simply a nice gesture. These sort of moments are precisely why I utterly adore her, and why I’m never, ever letting her go.