Sunrise Rebekah Griffin

He told me he loved me during the middle of a phone-call, his voice crackling slightly as the words reverberated through the car. I was weaving through traffic, half asleep, on my way to work. My phone wedged between the seatbelt and my collarbone, sunlight streaming through the windscreen. I recoiled at the sudden flash of sunrise that burned dancing circles across my retina. ‘What?’ I asked, squinting as I flipped the visor down. ‘I love you,’ he repeated. The sunglasses I was wrestling one-handed tumbled into the gaping chasm beneath my seat as my mouth fell open. ‘I…’ I what? My heart started pounding, tears began to erupt from my eyes. A car horn startling me as I pulled over to the side of the road. My face was hot and my skin felt strange, tingling, like I had been sitting stagnant for too long. Is this what it was supposed to feel like? He wasn’t the first to say those words. Indeed, I had heard them many times before from many different mouths. They bounced around in my memory like the colours swirling in my vision.

The first was a boy whose name I remember, but whose face I can’t recall. I was seven, he was eight. We met under the peppercorn tree at recess. He handed me a Fantale, planted a sloppy kiss on my lips, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he said those three words. I repeated them back, staring hungrily at the chocolate-coated treat. I thought about that kiss all afternoon as it melted on my tongue. He broke my heart the next day when the routine was repeated with my best friend—only he gave her a Freddo Frog instead.

The next was a boy from the Catholic High School. We were fourteen and danced together at a red-light disco. I insisted on giving him my phone number. He rang the next day and asked me why I wanted him to call. I was stumped. Wasn’t that what we were supposed to do—exchange phone numbers at a dance and live happily ever after? Three months later, he was feeling me up behind the playground at the river. As he heaved hot breath onto my neck, he moaned those three words and begged me to let him do it. I declined, but I repeated his line, an alternative surrender. A week later, I dumped him for calling my brother a moron.

The third was my boss. I was eighteen. He was twenty. He approached me when I was finishing my last shift and asked me to dinner. I was about to move across the state and wasn’t sure if he was serious or not. I thought it was cute as his face flushed red when I asked why he waited until I quit to ask me out. He told me there was a rule that he wasn’t supposed to date the staff. We were together less than a month when we messily gave up our virginities to each other. Afterwards, I told him those three words. I wanted it to mean more than it had felt. He said, ‘I was never gonna do it with someone unless I loved them, so I guess this means I do too.’ Three years, and three hundred arguments later, he left me for one of the drive-thru chicks. I guess he didn’t really play by the rules after all. I wish that was the worst.

The worst was the one who never really said it at all. He lured me in with late night phone calls and alcohol. I fell, for the first time, and thought I knew what those mysterious words finally meant. He became a puzzle to solve, an obsession that I could not shake. I had to know what the secret was, what special thing could I do to make him say it? It was whispered once in the dark, in a drunken, semi-conscious state, as he ripped off my bra. I knew he meant it, even when he told me, he didn’t remember. But I knew he did…

…didn’t he?

He said it with his smile when he laughed at my jokes.

He said it with his eyes, surprised when I outwitted him.

It was the pride in his voice as he spouted off my achievements while he turned sausages on the barbecue and tipped his beer with the boys.

But it wasn’t. And he didn’t. He didn’t say it until later, until it was way too late. And even then, I don’t think he really meant it.

It wasn’t until the sun hit my face, as the man who would be the last, said those three words through the phone, without agenda, that I really knew what they meant.

I turned off the engine, tears streaming down my face as cars rushed past on the highway. There was silence for a moment, until his nervous voice asked: ‘Are you okay?’

A sob escaped my throat, as I searched myself for an answer. When I realised why I was crying, I started laughing.

‘I—I dropped my glasses!’ I exclaimed through tears. ‘I dropped them, and I love you too!’

We laughed together, and I wiped my eyes as I looked in the rear-view mirror.

I knew that it was real this time. He said it, and he wasn’t even close to me. Our relationship had formed despite the distance that separated us, oceans we crossed everyday just to hear each other’s voice.

He wasn’t tempting me with chocolate. He was on the phone as he stood in line at the airport, about to embark on a 22-hour journey, just to see me.

He wasn’t whispering so no-one else would know.

He hadn’t offered it as payment for a kiss.

He wasn’t trying to coax it from me with one hand down my shirt.

He didn’t need anything from me, and I hadn’t said it first: because I didn’t need to hear it. But still he said it. And then he said it again, and again, and again.

And I said it too. And even to this day, we don’t just say it. We show it.

Neither of us need to guess it. It just is.

It’s as glaringly obvious as that burst of sunlight that streaks across the windshield of your car. It makes you blink dancing circles and drop your sunglasses as you struggle to flip the visor down and try not to careen into oncoming traffic. It’s sweeter than a Fantale, or a hundred Freddo Frogs.

It’s more joyful than dancing to your favourite song with a cute boy at a disco.

It’s better than the taste of cold beer and a warm snag in summer at a barbecue with your friends. It’s even better than sex.

We don’t need to question it. If it is, it just is.

It is always there, like the sunrise.

When we hung up, I turned the radio up as loud as I could and sang at the top of my lungs, all the way to work.