A Special Date
/A true story written for Valentine's Day.
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My fiancée and I seemed to have been waiting forever to move in together. We were due to be married a few months later, but the start of our journey was getting the house. In the run up to Christmas, we’d had meetings with the bank and the estate agents, signed endless forms, paid out hundreds of pounds for all kinds of surveys and reports, and gone through all these complicated hurdles that home-owners must clear in order to have a place of their own.
As the weeks of January dragged slowly by there was no news of the house. The momentum of the move seemed to have ground to a stop. When we would call the estate agents, we would be informed that these things take time, that everything was in hand and being processed. Our excitement was turning into frustration. Would we ever have a place of our own? Would we ever move into the house we’d decided on?
I was at work one Tuesday morning when my fiancée called me. The estate agents had been in touch. They would phone her in the next week or so to inform us of a completion date. How exciting! At long last things were actually happening. We had been worried nothing would happen and that after the wedding, we’d still both be living with our respective parents, without a marital home of our own.
A few days later, my fiancée received the call we’d been waiting for. She calmly and politely thanked the estate agent and ended the call. As she hung up she shrieked in delight.
‘We’ve got a date!’
We actually had an agreed date for completion, the date when all the boxes would be ticked, paperwork stamped and signed and exchanged, when we would be the legal owners of the house.
It was such great news, and it was only days away. Wonderful. We would move in on the completion day, and over the days and weeks that followed, we would get the house sorted properly and settle in.
In the initial days we would be roughing it, sleeping on an inflatable air bed, our clothes stored in suitcases, sitting on hard-back wooded chairs, until the furniture was ordered and delivered. Newspapers would be taped to the windows, until we organised to have curtains and a rail put up.
On the big day, we headed over to the estate agent in the small van we’d hired. The estate agent shook our hands, congratulated us, and handed us the keys. Twenty minutes later we pulled up outside the house, our new home. We stared at the keys in my hand for a long moment. These were the keys to let us in, to take us across the threshold to our new life together.
While my fiancée unlocked the front door, I cranked open the back doors of the van and started unloading what belongings we would initially be bringing with us.
The living room was sparsely furnished. The television set was mounted on an upturned cardboard box. The light bulb over head was bare. We spent the afternoon unpacking the boxes and putting things in position.
That evening, we sat on hard wooden chairs, watching TV and eating take-away pie and chips out of the papers, with plastic forks.
‘Oh, you know what date it is today?’ She asked.
‘Yes, 14th February.’ I said.
‘It’s Valentine’s Day.’ She corrected.
‘Of course.’
In all the chaos of moving out, and moving, the significance of the date itself had completely passed us by.
‘You know what I’ve bought you for Valentine’s Day?’ I asked, with a grin.
‘What?’
‘Half a house.’ I laughed.
‘What a coincidence,’ she said, ‘I’ve bought you the other half!’
In the two decades since, Valentine’s Day has always been special for us, as it means another year of living together, one more year in our home.
By Chris Platt
From: United Kingdom