Rowan and Jaxon – April 19, 2023
Non-Traditional Elopement
Jax and I met in January of 2019 at a call center job that we both ended up quitting a month later. Jaxon had just moved back in with his mom after a stint in Las Vegas that left him homeless and sobering from heroin, and I had also just moved back home to live with my mom after two years living in Atlanta and having to flee an abusive relationship. Neither of us could find jobs and we ended up in the same training class at a notoriously horrible call center job and it was instant magnetism. We were both aaaalmost late for the first day, and I remember being 10 or 12 paces behind Jax the entire walk from the parking lot to the door, thinking, “I need to know that bitch.”
A week later we were invited to a game night by another coworker and both went hoping the other would be there. We played Cards Against Humanity and repeatedly picked each others cards— I think the card that finally promoted a conversation was something about Meryl Streep. By February we moved into the apartment next to the one we attended game night in, were “roommates” for maybe a month before everyone around us stopped letting us tell that lie, lol!
The first real date we went on was to a community theater play about Helen Keller, and it was a nightmare. Our trainer at the call center had a role in the play and really liked us, so invited us to come see it. We were in our reckless era, so naturally we pregamed the very serious community production with peppermint schnapps, and then accepted our invitation to the cast after party. The night ended up including stealing champagne from the after party, throwing up on the sidewalk in beautiful historic Jonesborough, and refusing to kiss Jaxon goodnight. It was by every definition a very bad date, but the next morning— and literally every day since— we have hung out. We couldn’t get enough of each other.
Proposals are kind of old fashioned, and I never wanted to get married anyway— so I guess there wasn’t a real proposal. Jaxon proposed several times in our first year together, and I said no several times (and yes once, but the 24 hour chapel wouldn’t marry us same day) but once the political climate started to change and we began to wonder how long we would maintain the right to marriage, it became a more serious conversation. Ultimately the marriage was very important to Jaxon and Jaxon is very important to me, so the reveal that I’d booked a surprise elopement was the closest we have to a real proposal. We are looking forward most to having a ceremony as intimate and deeply personal as our entire friendship and relationship has been… and to having some stunning pics taken, because in all of our 4 years together we’ve never paid for photos together.
Is there any significance to the date? There is, and it requires sharing a little bit of psychedelic cultural legend I suppose. April 19, 1943 was the day Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first ingested LSD in his lab in Basel. About an hour into the first acid trip ever, Hofmann started to feel the effects of the drug and had his laboratory assistant escort him home— on bicycle, as was customary in Basel. As they biked through the city, Hofmann became immersed in the colors, textures, smells, and the sounds of his home in a way he couldn’t have felt possible before. The term Bicycle Day was used first in 1985 in Illinois by a college professor who hosted the first “Bicycle Day” celebration in his home on April 19th wherein he and his guests partook in a communal LSD trip. We know that recreational drug use is controversial in the states, but we have also used LSD and other hallucinogens to heal our traumas together and connect with each other and the planet on levels that would have taken decades to cultivate without the aid of mind opening substances. It’s become an integral, almost religious practice for us, and want to be able to revisit it every year as we age together— even as we settle into more “grown up” life.
For fun, we love taking weekend trips, antiquing, going to breweries and concerts— but really we just love anything that gives us the space to be together.
