48) Pickled Onions

I’ve been wondering lately if it’s ever possible to really know a person. That is to know them inside out, to see the inner corners of their mind, to fill in all the blank spaces and questions in your own mind about them.
Maybe it’s the wedding date getting closer thats got me thinking this. Maybe its age, or maybe it’s the fact that Gerry told me recently that he likes pickled onions.

Pickled. Onions.

Onions that are pickled.

This from the man who wouldn’t even eat eggs when we first met.

7 years together and one day, in the supermarket, he randomly mentions that he loves pickled onions. So much so that he grabbed a jar of them and put it in the shopping cart. I swear the earth shifted on its axis. I was so shocked by this pickled onion revelation that it got me thinking Do I even really know this man?! Who am I marrying? We continued the food shop, him chatting away and actually shopping for food, me with my mouth hanging open unable to speak starring at the alien jar of pickled onions in our basket wondering who this stranger was that I was shopping with. I think I genuinely would have been less baffled if he had confessed that he killed a man.

Pickled. Onions.

For the next few weeks, every time I opened the fridge at home, I eyed the pickled onion jar with suspicion. It staring back at me smugly, taunting me with the sudden possibility that there are lots of things that I potentially don’t know about the man that I’m soon to legally tie myself to.

Onions that are pickled.

Now it would be one thing if he suddenly grew to like pickled onions, growth is normal, but no this was not the case! He has liked them since he was a child apparently! Thankfully he reverted back to the man I know and love by immediately forgetting that he had purchased something on impulse, leaving them in the fridge untouched for months until I finally checked the best before date and threw them out.

Pickled. Onions.

His twin brother moved to NZ last week. I had never met him before but he didn’t feel like a stranger. His imminent arrival opened the floodgates for more Who Are You stories, I was treated to a humorous anecdote about homemade bunk beds amongst others. (Spoiler: they were not well constructed, hilarious antics followed). Luckily the shock of the pickled onion incident had prepared me for such stories and although I was still surprised to hear these new childhood memories I was now able to welcome them to the narrative of the man I love.

Perhaps the real issue with the question of how well can you ever know someone isn’t how well can you know their past but how well do you know their heart. That’s the one thing that remains the same. After 7 years together he still manages to surprise and amuse me with random stories of his childhood that I have never heard before. New mental pictures of young Gerry eating pickled onions before falling off a hazardously constructed DIY bunk bed in his sleep now fill my head.

I guess you can only ever know the things about a person that they choose to share with you. It’s up to them how much they reveal. But then again they are just things, moments, anecdotes of the past.

I know him.

Goddamn pickled onions.

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Stuck In A Rut

48) Pickled Onions

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