I read an EW article about Jackson and April (“Japril”) from Grey’s Anatomy, how their love story happened in the margins.
I was never a fan of the two together, a wildly successful surgeon and an uptight Christian girl who ran out on her wedding to another uptight Christian to pursue her love affair with Jackson. (Although that was a good episode.) But the phrase stuck with me.
The point was that their story evolved over several seasons, in the margins of viewers’ minds while the show focused on other characters and crises. One day they gravitated to each other and we wondered how we hadn’t seen it coming all along.
I think about how that applies to our own lives. I’ve had a lot of instant connections as well as a few carefully cultivated ones.
But it’s the ones that evolved organically … the ones where you see someone looking at you and wonder wow, was that there all along and we missed it until now?
Those were some of the best ones.
Which makes it so hard to NOT look in the margins again.
As if lightning could ever strike twice in the same place.
As if margin can’t amplify your losses as much as your joys.
As if you could ever find meaning in the text when the best stuff is what you were inspired to scrawl.
As if anyone could ever understand feeling so moved to ruin a perfectly good book with that flash of something great.
Even a flash was all it was ever meant to be … and even if it wasn’t.