What was the best day of your life?

A day at the zoo with an old girlfriend. We were both highly amused by a chimpanzee that could raise just one eyebrow in a very suave manner and often did. He became Roger Moore the chimpanzee. Two otters alternately frequented a muddy ditch and played with stones in the pond. They became Bad Pit and Jennifer And-Her-Stone. An okapi became our friend Steve because of his ridiculous striped trousers. We were giddy and affectionate. It actually crossed my mind that this might be the happiest day of my life so far. Then she asked me what I liked about her. Somewhere in the middle distance, a car should have screeched to a halt, and I should have heard it and paused for thought. Instead, I told her that I liked her eyes. This was, in itself, true. They were the most wonderful deep chocolate brown and they always appeared to be smiling. She wanted to know why I liked her eyes. Then I really needed the screech of tyres, and perhaps a bolt of lightning too. I should have told her about the brown and the smiling. Instead, I told her that they were correct in number and generally in the accepted location for eyes. She laughed but I don't think she meant it.

There was little argument about which animals we should see. She likes small furries and I like small furries. I also like big furries, though, and nothing would persuade me to leave without seeing the polar bears. How I wish I'd avoided them. The male was navigating the enclosure in a pattern so tightly controlled that it had moved beyond anal and into mechanical. He took the same paths that led nowhere, again and again. I remembered the statistic that polar bears in a zoo have a territory smaller than those in the wild by a factor of (wait for it) a million times. To see him and his thousand-yard stare, I wondered whether he'd lost hope that the open moraine was just around the corner and had simply transferred his mind there; somewhere his body never would be. During this thought process of mine, my girlfriend named him. She chose my christian name.

On the way home I told her what I really thought of her eyes, about the brown and the smiling. She appeared to like it so much that she thought she'd put me right back on the spot. She asked what else I liked about her. Before I had time to think, the coach screeched madly as some idiot cut right in front of us. She forgot the question and we spent thirty minutes talking about sandwiches and snuggling.

For a day tinged with sadness, it seems strange that it still stands out as the pinnacle of a time when everything seemed easy, and hopeful, and bright. I miss being in a relationship.