*Chicago (and the Cubs)

Okay, even if we all know that the story ends tragically with Sarah dying of cancer and me becoming a grad student, the journey to that point might begin to get a tad boring. I'm beginning to realize that I'm summarizing our life cycles at various stages of the timeline, and that's bound to get taxing for the reader (you) eventually. You don't need every little detail, do you? "And then, one time, Sarah and I went to the zoo!" Who needs that?
We never went to a zoo together, actually, but we were both in the same city as a zoo, once.
Chicago. Or, "Chicargo" if you're of that group of people.
Peter and Sarah, Paul and Andie; spouses and spouses-to-be, unleashed on the third-largest American city, to refuse change to the homeless of another country while also checking out Lollapalooza.
Here was my future wife's chance to finally meet the other half of my brain, the one person throughout life who saw things as I did. Andie, my wife, had heard so much about her...
Sarah turned out to be a total drag, though. She was moody and not that fun and didn't joke and didn't ask Andie getting-to-know-you questions and didn't make jokes about how stupid my face is and didn't seem herself. When I wandered with Peter into the glub of people waiting for Queens of the Stone Age, Sarah and Andie stayed behind. Sarah then drunkenly pointed out most of my faults and didn't sugarcoat them the way that she always did when we were both single.
Like, pretend it was five years prior to this, and we were eating in a restaurant somewhere. Now, if the waitress was cute, Sarah would make a point of saying, "We're not having sex with each other. We're just eating. He has a bunch of stupid tattoos that you can look at if you see him with his shirt off."
She thought she was helping. I'm not exaggerating this, by the way, this is the exact sort of thing she would say to complete strangers.
Anyway, Chicargo marked a really weird interlude that luckily only lasted a couple of days and never saw light again.
In time, I came to learn that she was so weird because she missed the kids, and lacking motherhood and all of its instincts, that thought had never even dawned on me.
We all did a poor job of taking pictures on that trip, but I have one among the annals of my hard drives, where she sits with her husband atop a giant Ferris wheel, and she has a look of boredom and longing for the ground. It's one of my least favourite pictures of her, but that doesn't mean it isn't a good one.
I think back to those days (so recent) and wish she and I could've had a minute to ourselves. Our partners weren't stopping us, mind you, we just weren't trying as we should have been. I wasn't trying as I should have been.
I would have liked to have had coffee with my Yin's Yang in that city of gangsters.
With Sarah and I, sometimes a minute was all it took.