Whacking Poetic and the Notes to My Future Wife

Chapter 1

Forever Chest

Engagement Card

My dear fiancée,

They say that everyone plans the wedding, and no one plans for the marriage. To counter the disillusionment that tears apart so many, I offer this protective chest. The Forever Chest is designed to protect the passion that energizes the bond between us, the most precious treasure we have.

In this chest, you will find one wedding card and then one anniversary card for each of the next fifty years. By writing and signing each card today, I am promising to be there each year as they are opened. More than just typical anniversary cards, each are written to capture my happiest memories, my most shameless love poetry and my earnest hopes for our future, all written before the sugarless oatmeal of routine and bickering dulls my appetite.

To ensure that this is a shared effort, I have also enclosed fifty-one cards for you to sign. I would like for you to also reflect on where you want to be in five years, ten years... fifty years. It is a chance for you to speak to your future self, and remind us both how you entered this relationship with the same foresight and self-examination that I have.

To ensure that our love story doesn't slog into monotony, I have also included an empty journal and scrapbook. We must continue to build on and capture our adventures so that we can always fall back on good times.

The Forever Chest engagement present is part treasure chest, as what we store here will be invaluable. It is part time capsule, as it captures for future review our current infatuation. It is part romance novel, as in fifty years we will have a journal that will detail the living love affair that we made reality. And finally, the Forever Chest is part promise. A promise that we will be eager every year to see what we created for each other, that we truly comprehend what it means to be with someone forever, and that we are so confident in our relationship that we can commit to and prepare for our fiftieth wedding anniversary before we have even spoken our vows.

Love,
Sam

"Geez Sam, do you even think about where you're going before you leave?" said Alex as she pointed to a clog of cars stopped in front them in the road, a good two miles from campus.

Sam stepped on the breaks of their ten-year-old 1995 Volvo sedan, the lurch causing his vinyl Homer Simpson half mask to shift down over his eyes. He was so eager to get to the show he hadn't thought about driving around the annual Halloween mosh pit of Batmans, cavemen, Peyton Mannings, cookie monsters, priests, vampires, police officers, firemen, Harry Potters, and the ten thousand girls that Alex would say looked slutty. It was a scene they had enjoyed less and less in the ten years since they had arrived in Chapel Hill as freshmen.

He pushed the mask up to find a college-aged mermaid in a green bikini top sitting next to a George Romero zombie in the open bed of the idling pickup truck in front of them. They appeared to be singing as they swayed back and forth.

Alex sat up, forcing her bright blue Marge Simpson wig up against the inside of the car as she tried to look out the passenger window past the truck. Then she slumped back down with a sigh. "I told you not to go this way. And would you take that stupid mask off? I didn't think you weren't going to stop."

"I can see." Sam said as he returned both hands to the wheel. She was certainly right, but each progressive time she whined about it, his cropped view got clearer. "Look, there's our new singer," he continued with a laugh as he pointed at the zombie. "But you see, it's not me," he sang in a stilted Irish accent about an octave above his natural voice, "it's not my family. In your head, in your head they are fighting, with their tanks and their bombs. And their bombs. And their gones." He stopped. "Their gones? You know, mispronouncing guns doesn't make it rhyme with bombs."