Theo had been talking about Fridays on the Plaza since approximately March.
Not because he's a huge Switchfoot guy, necessarily. Not because the Marshall Tucker Band occupies some sacred corner of his soul. More because Theo has this thing where he latches onto a future event as a kind of emotional anchor, and then he treats the entire period between now and that event as a countdown he personally invented.
"June fifth," he kept saying. Like a date he was owed.
So when May turned warm and windy and the calendar started to fill up—the farmers market, the botanic gardens thing, library stuff I kept seeing on my phone—I suggested we do something this week. Just to get outside. Ease into summer. The afternoon was hitting the upper seventies, which in Cheyenne means you're in a genuine golden window before the wind picks up or a thunderstorm rolls in sideways from nowhere.
He said yes immediately, which should have been my first warning.
Theo's yeses contain multitudes.
By the time we got downtown he had already narrated, unprompted, his complete vision for June fifth: where we'd park, which food vendor he was going to find, the specific position on the plaza he'd identified via what I can only describe as advance satellite reconnaissance. He had opinions about lawn chair placement relative to speaker towers. He used the phrase "optimal audio zone" in a regular sentence.
"We're not even here for that today," I said. "We're just walking around."
"I know," he said. "I'm just saying. For context."
The context lasted forty-five minutes.
We passed a poster for the concert series stapled to something near a lamppost and he stopped moving entirely. Like a dog who has spotted another dog. He studied it with the focused reverence of a man reading a will.
"Lit is on the lineup," he said quietly.
"I see that."
"My Own Worst Enemy Lit."
"Yes."
He was quiet for a moment. The wind moved his hair. Somewhere behind us, very faint, a kid was eating kettle corn from a paper bag. The sky had that particular May look it gets out here, bright and slightly suspicious, like it's deciding whether to behave.
"I feel like this summer is going to be formative," Theo said.
He says this every summer. I have heard it, in varying constructions, since we started dating. The summer of the inexplicable bread-making phase. The summer he became briefly and intensely interested in storm chasing as a hobby. The summer he drove us forty minutes to a food truck that was closed.
All formative. All documented.
"It might be," I said, because I am a reasonable person and also I didn't want to get into it on a public sidewalk.
He looked at me. He could tell I was being patient.
"Okay but this one actually might be," he said. "Switchfoot, June fifth, optimal audio zone. I've planned it. I've really thought about it."
The thing about Theo is that he means every single word of this. He is not performing enthusiasm. He genuinely believes that the convergence of a nostalgia-heavy concert lineup, a downtown plaza in a Wyoming summer, and his own advance planning constitutes a kind of destiny. He believes this the way other people believe in weather forecasts or loyalty rewards programs: completely, and without embarrassment.
I took his hand, which is the only diplomatic response.
We kept walking. He bought a lemonade from a stand near the depot and narrated its quality as though filing a report. He stopped to watch a dog for longer than was strictly necessary. He saw something on his phone about a birding class happening at a park nearby and said, and I quote, "I feel like we should look into that," which is how I know summer is truly beginning, because Theo's aspirational calendar expands seasonally like a living organism.
At four-thirty the sky started doing that thing. Purple at the edges. Wind picking up. Classic High Plains mood swing. We'd been out for almost three hours.
"We should head back," I said.
"Five more minutes," he said.
He was already looking at the plaza again. Planning something. I could see it in the angle of his chin, the slight narrowing of his eyes, the way he was clearly already on June fifth in his head even though we were solidly in May.
I gave him the five minutes.
I almost always do.