text: Right after we got engaged, before we ever got married, my groom-to-be and I went shopping at a discount department store, and I found these darling ceramic drink coasters with gold “H’s” painted in the middle. H for Harp, our soon-to-be shared surname. They were one of the first things I ever purchased for us. For our life together. He told me they were silly and that “no one uses coasters anymore.” But *we would,* I thought. I used to daydream that we would be the kind of couple who lounged on the couch together on Sunday afternoons, noses buried in books, with our teas or coffees or what have you placed neatly on our personalized coasters on our coffee table before us. We would be that couple that everyone was envious of, because down to the last detail, down to our coasters, you would be able to sense how strong our bond was. How committed we were to each other as people, and how committed we were to each other’s dreams. I loved those coasters, and what they represented. We were stylish and cool, with better, modern versions of old stuff that “no one uses anymore”. We were the better, modern versions of our parents, committed for life but with a sleek new spin. We had that old school love but with fresh, new, gold paint. When I bought the coasters, we were in college. Freshly engaged and sketching plans for our lives together. So full of dreams for ourselves we were rarely present in reality. We had it all figured out, and I had my coasters packed away in a box in a closet in my mother’s basement, tucked away from the clumsy carelessness of everyday life. I remember when we moved out of the dorms and into our first house, a trailer in the woods outside of our college town. The coasters were transferred, coming out of the box and into a cupboard in the kitchen of our new home, a black ribbon still tied around the four glass disks, still with the price tag attached. We were busy working on our degrees and were rarely home. The calm afternoons of coffee and reading would have to wait. The coasters gathered dust. Over the next couple years, big changes happened. We had jump started our lives and were running beside them, trying to keep up. We went from a trailer to an apartment with lofted cathedral ceilings and a big back deck. He graduated and got his first job. We started hunting for houses. I was chipping away at my degree at a steady pace, counting the days till graduation. We were talking about kids. So much was happening, our afternoons were the furthest from calm, almost hectic, with no end in sight, but we were excited and in love and blinded by our dreams igniting into reality before our eyes. We were busy, but so happy. And the coasters stayed tucked away, in the spare room, still with the ribbon, still with the tags. Still with my dreams attached to them, and every time id pass over them while looking in boxes for something else I needed, I would smile. Because I knew my calm days were coming. 2015 was a big year for us. We purchased our first house. We moved in on the evening of my 22nd birthday, and spent our first night in our first house. It doesn’t feel real, saying it now. How perfect that moment was, like something from a movie. I remember we slept on an air mattress on the floor, exhausted and covered in paint. We were so tired, but we were happy. Sometime in the following weeks, I unpacked the house, including the coasters. I proudly displayed them on our cheap particle board coffee table from Walmart. They were the only thing besides the remotes I wanted sitting there. I remember setting it up, and taking a step back to just take it all in. It was mine. I was building my space and this is what it looked like. I happily went back to work decorating and unpacking other parts of the house, making it our own. It strikes me now how organic that moment in our lives was. We created a home from some walls and some paint. We grew into our environment, and expanded, and reproduced, and made it our own. It really was a beautiful thing. But in our growing, we made messes. Got careless. Our coffee table turned into a dining table, a work table, a counter, and with as much stuff as we were constantly putting on and taking off of it, he must have moved the coasters to the desk in the foyer, because one day I just didn’t see them there. But, what you don’t see cant trigger memories, and such the coasters slipped from my mind just as they slipped off the table and into a quiet, undisturbed space, pushed back against the wall behind his computer monitor that collected dust and blocked them from view. The dream I had for us slipped silently from my mind. Our daughter was born, and suddenly things like glass coasters wouldn't have been okay to have around her anyway, so the thoughts of the golden crested coasters never crossed my mind, until the day that he accidentally knocked them off the desk. He was moving the monitor over to make room for something on the desk, most likely his printer, and in the commotion, the disks slid off the desk and onto the hardwood floor. Immediately he started apologizing, and as he picked them up and turned them over in his hands one by one, he discovered that one had chipped. A perfect “V”-shape out of one of the coasters. He clicked his tongue in slight disappointment, turned to me and said “Sorry” again, before discarding the chipped coaster into a plastic trash bag on the floor. I don’t know why those coasters meant so much to me, and I realize now that I finally understand why he wasn’t as silently devastated in that moment it broke as I was. I kept searching his face for a mirror of what I was feeling, but all I saw was sheepishness. I never told him what they meant to me, I’m sure to him they were just cheap coasters we never used. But to me, those coasters represented how uninterested he was in utilizing the space we built for peace, how little he cared about the small details. The worst part of this story is that there isn't a happy ending. Sometimes in life, you plan your future down to the very last detail. These dreams you build for yourself grow and change second to second, and small details get left behind. But when you grow up and realize that what you thought was a small detail at the time actually turned out to be a big, significant detail, and you can’t get closure on it, what you're left with is a disappointed hollow feeling. Sometimes, in life, you will work your ass off to achieve a dream, and all you will be left with is a broken coaster. And you have to learn to be okay with that.