The girl smiled as she looked at an old photograph of her mother and father nuzzled cheek to cheek, mouths and eyes smiling back at her. They were no doubt tipsy off of the New Year's wine shared at the party the picture captured. Or maybe they were just in love...then. That picture was before baby one and baby two, before real arguments where unforgivable and unforgettable words were thrown into the world; Before other women and the crushing weight of family opinion; Before idle thoughts of the possibility of a life apart took root and resentment spurned its fevered growth. In that photo though, there was love.
She knew the reality of their lives together, at least the reality her mother shared, still many days she would find herself sitting cross-legged on the living-room floor staring intently at the faces of her mother and father and family members, known and unknown, surrounding her from old albums and carelessly strewn loose photos. She would gaze lovingly at their pictures wishing for another life, one in which they remembered their love. Why didn't they remember how perfect they were together?
Her favorite picture was one in which her father wrapped his big arms around her mother’s tiny waist. They were holding each other playfully as if they just shared a tasty secret. Her mother's eyes were closed and she was laughing. Her father's eyes were bright as he looked at the camera. His smile contained all the happiness in the world. They fit. They were perfect. They were one. She smiled at how easily they loved each other. She thought of how they must have met and how they fell in love, of how they made their love into a living, breathing thing and named it Eve. The embodiment of everything good about them, created to always remind them of the love they had for each other.
She'd think of her parents and this mythic love for years. She held on to her yearning for their reconciliation until her chest would hurt with longing. She never fully realized that childhood wishes too long coveted misshapes reality. Her parents couldn't be more different. The seemingly only thing they had in common was that they loved her and even within that they were different. Her mother's love was free and encouraging; her father's stern and filled with conditions. No matter. To her they were the still the beautiful, smiling people in the photographs and she created an ideal of love nothing could ever realistically match.
She dreamed of a man who’d love her just so and fill her with so much giddiness she'd dance the entire day with just the thought of seeing him. A man who would kiss her and make her knees go weak. Wasn’t that how it was in movies? A man who'd love her more with each day; There’d be so much love between then that they too would create their own living, breathing thing in which to place all the extra love they shared. If life was kind and long-held prayers answered, there was nothing for her to do but wait. Her love would come and they’d live, as it should be, ever after.

Sitting alone, curled up in one corner of her couch, staring at her own wedding-day photograph many years later, Eve wistfully remembered the two people staring back at her. Happy and beautiful, smiling and in love. Where did they go? Her focus on the picture shifted and she caught her own reflection in the glass front of the picture frame. She touched her face. What happened to you? She pulled her cheeks upward until they were so taunt her eyes were forced to close. She released her cheeks and saw herself once again. Her sigh was long and heavy. She focused her gaze on the man in the photograph. His smile was so bright and wide. There seemed to be genuine happiness there. It was a look so foreign to him now. They shared a home and little else. Strangers, who barely spoke, who greeted each other with averted eyes and questions about bills and baby duty and making sure their schedules aligned to present the appearance of unity. This was what life was now and joy had no place. Voices and faces flashed in her mind as her head rolled slowly backward coming to rest so her eyes looked skyward. How did it get to this? How did we get so lost from each other? She thought back to when they met, fifteen years ago, at a party held by mutual friends. She thought back to their early days together. There were five-hour conversations about nothing, deep and fraught with meaning. They laughed easily then. He called her ‘my love’ and she called him ‘baby’. They spoke about the children they’d have. He wanted a girl who looked just like her and she, five little, dimpled boys all as handsome as their father and who’d love and protect her as much as he’d promised to.
A tear rolled from her eye so quickly she didn’t have time to catch it before it fell. She was surprised- she didn’t think she had any tears left to cry for him, for herself, or for them. For fifteen years, they built the foundation of their personal and professional lives together and around each other, and three years ago their little girl was born. More tears fell as she thought of their daughter. The child looked and acted so much like him, Eve would often stare at her, mesmerized by the likeness. Eve’s eyes once again fell on her wedding photograph and her eyes trailed along the other photographs all in a neat line next to the wedding portrait stationed atop the fireplace. She stood and walked over to the pictures and saw it there; the old photograph of her mother and father hugging and laughing, her father’s big arms around her mother’s tiny waist. Fresh tears fell, and heaving sobs wracked her shoulders. Sadness poured out of her like a bottle whose cork had come undone. Long, deep sobs, such eloquent sadness, leaving her folded into herself at the foot of the fireplace clutching her mother and father’s picture to her chest as though she were drowning and it was the only thing that kept her afloat. Where did she go wrong? Wasn’t she enough to keep his love past fifteen years? Wasn’t what they had here something of value, something worthwhile? There weren’t any answers.
The last tear made its way onto her blouse and her sobs finally subsided. She pulled herself up and gently wiped her eyes with her free hand and with the other she placed her parent’s photograph back to its rightful place among her memories of happier times and different people.
She walked over to the dining table and sat down, her gaze focused intently on the blue and white folded letter. She slid her hand into the fold to reopen the letter and her fingers found the pen lying splayed across the paper where she’d left it earlier. Her eyes glazed over the form and the words marriage, dissolution, separate, divorce, seemed larger than all the others on the page. She sighed again, deeply, fully. She turned toward the kitchen, her eyes desperate for solace. Just then a sliver of sunlight found its way through the clouds and through her kitchen window. She rose and walked directly to it. She stood totally still, eyes closed, neck ached upward as the sunlight caressed her face. For the first time in a long time she smiled and felt happiness and warmth. For the first time in a long time she felt that love would one day come again.