Declan texted me at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday to tell me he had "a whole thing" for the Blues home opener. This should have been enough information. I have been dating Declan for two years. I know what "a whole thing" means. It means a spreadsheet I wasn't consulted on, a parking spot selected using criteria I'll never fully understand, and at least one opinion about a one-way street delivered with the gravity of a man testifying before Congress.
The game was Tuesday the 8th. He had been planning since Saturday.
He sent me the itinerary Sunday night. It had time blocks.
There was a 4:45 p.m. window labeled "depart — optimal window, pre-congestion corridor closes at 5:10." There was a note about the Wash Ave Food Hall soft-opening situation, which he had cross-referenced against a Reddit thread and a guy from his rec league named Denny who had "boots on the ground." Declan does not personally know Denny very well. Denny became load-bearing to this plan anyway.
I said, "It's a hockey game."
He said, "It's the home opener."
I said those were not different things.
He gave me a look that I can only describe as a man watching someone try to read a map upside down, patient but pained.
We left at 4:47, which was already a crisis. He didn't say it was a crisis but he merged onto 40 with an urgency that told me everything. The morning had been beautiful — that specific early October light where you leave the house in a jacket and then deeply regret the jacket by noon — and by the time we were downtown it was still warm enough that I had tied the jacket around my waist like a person at a school field trip in 1997. Declan was wearing his Blues jersey. The jersey was not a question for him. The jersey is never a question. I had made the mistake, earlier in the week, of asking if he'd considered wearing the alternate and he'd explained the alternate situation to me for eleven minutes while I stood in the kitchen eating crackers and nodding.
We parked in the structure he had pre-selected. He had pre-selected it eighteen days ago. He had a screenshot.
Denny's food hall tip turned out to be that the food hall wasn't actually open yet, which Denny had reported at 3 p.m. and Declan had not seen because he was refreshing the Blues official site for lineup news. We ended up at a place on Olive that had just opened — Bukchon Kimbap, actually, which turned out to be genuinely excellent and completely unplanned, which I think privately killed Declan a little even as he was eating the best thing he'd had all week.
He said, "I would've found this eventually."
I said, "You found it by accident."
He said, "I found it by staying flexible."
This is what Declan does. He builds the scaffolding so tight that when something good falls through the cracks, he retroactively claims the cracks were load-bearing.
We made it to the game. The Blues won. He had printed — actually printed, on paper, from our printer at home — the section map, and he had highlighted our row, and when I laughed at him he folded it very carefully and put it back in his jacket pocket and refused to be embarrassed about it, which is honestly one of the things I love most about him. He is completely sincere about all of it. The spreadsheet, the parking, the eighteen-day-old screenshot. He is not performing organization. He genuinely believes that if he thinks hard enough about a Tuesday night hockey game in October, he can protect us from something.
I don't know what. Traffic, maybe. Uncertainty. The feeling that good things just happen to you without your help.
On the way home he asked if I'd had fun.
I said yes, which was true.
He said the parking structure had "performed well."
I held his hand and looked out the window at the city going dark, still a little warm even at ten o'clock, and thought about how I am going to marry this absolute disaster of a man someday, probably, assuming he lets me see the venue itinerary first.