“Here.” She placed a pink envelope, sealed with a unicorn bubble sticker in his hands and gave him a kiss on his forehead before hopping into her mom’s SUV and driving away, leaving him forever.

It was the last day of school. And it wasn’t the normal sort of last day where you say goodbye to all your friends until you can meet them in the summer again. This was a day of real goodbyes. Final goodbyes. At least for the one person who mattered most to him out of all of Mr. Hennington’s 4th grade class: her. She was moving to Hawaii, a magical tropical paradise far away from Ohio in the ocean called the Pacific Ocean. There were hula dancers there, and people who dance with torches, and one other boy in their class whispered to him that when she moved there she would wear a bikini made of coconuts. He did not know what a bikini was so he imagined that she would wear a giant ballgown of fabulous coconuts and a tiara of palm fronds. What a lucky girl.

He sighed in bittersweet love and aching for her as he stared into the packed parking lot. Kids, chattering in gleeful excitement for the coming months of freedom to surf YouTube 12 hours straight every day, boarded their parents’ ships for the last time in 4th grade. He looked around for his mom’s car. It was white. It was a Subaru. It was a lot cleaner than dad’s car, which was also white and looked almost the same except with more dirt along the bottom and insects smashed into the windshield.

With no sign of the clean car, he plopped into the grass. A muddy patch specifically to express his sorrow to the world. And because he didn’t care about his Paw Patrol pants. He was getting too old—too mature for that show. Someone who felt love as deeply as he did now or such deep pain at losing his only love is too mature to watch a show with talking dogs.

He was still holding that envelope that had given him a rush of dopamine when she placed it in his meaty, sweaty little hand. His impulse to open it scorched his insides, but he wanted to save reading her final words to him for later. For when it would mean more to him. For when the sound of her voice fades from his memory and he begins to forget what she looks like. Right then the color of her eyes, her wavy hair, her plump flushed cheeks framing her smile, her hair, were vivid in his mind’s eye like a lucid dream. He didn’t need to read her words, didn’t need to reach desperately for the memory of her, because he already had her. She hadn’t left him quite yet.

A tiny cry erupts from somewhere below my feet: “Mewwww!!”

My heart rate escalates and I begin scouring the ground. Sounds like a baby kitten! What’s a baby kitten doing in a Trader Joe’s parking lot!?

There, a grey fuzzball in the bushes!

He’s bleeding!

“MEWWWW!”

“IT’S OKAY, I’LL GET YOU TO SAFETY!”

I scoop him up and run across the parking lot like I’m being chased with a gun. Concerned heads turn.

I swing open my trunk and place him alongside 4 other injured kittens I coincidentally found while running errands today.

Looks like I’m a kitten rehabilitator now.

I dip my finger in it and wipe it on my girlfriend’s freckled nose.

“Aah! What is this!?”

She wipes it off with her sleeve like a cat grooming himself.

When she sees it on her arm her eyes bulge.

“No.” She says.

“Yes.” I confirm.

Now her blooming face shares my ecstasy.

“I did it, Babe! It’s the first entirely new color ever invented!”

“BABE!” She wails, jumping on me like a baby monkey on its mamma. “YOU’RE GOING TO BE FAMOUS!”

“You know what I named it? I named it Bertha.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“NO.”

She looks at me the happiest I’ve ever seen her in the 14 years we’ve been together.

It’s likely I’m going to be famous as the first scientist to ever create a completely new color. It’s likely I’ll be in history books. But I understand more than ever before that it won’t matter when I have this silly lady along for the whole ride.

“You named it after me?”