The assumptions and announcements dropped in from a distant country, so innocuous it was easy to ignore the subtext.
Out in the sun, I rolled up my sleeves to bare my shoulders, absorbed warmth against the chill. A cup of green tea, a new freckle or two, a moment to remember each mile I traveled to get here. I left any response I might have given somewhere out on the highway. In the golden light of afternoon, there was nothing to say.
Thin ice tightropes are my specialty, all slim-slippery, all risky-deadly, but magical when my footing holds and it all works out.
I am bruised, yes. But I know what it feels like to make it across.
Scratch that.
I hope, someday, I’ll know.
“Marriage is work,” people will offer, unsolicited, their advice plucked from their own lives, their love or lack of it, their own story.
But, marriage can be words juxtaposed in a way no one thought of before, the surprise turn inside a jazz phrase, a life built so creatively that two become more beautiful, more whole, as one.
Even moments of dissonance cannot quell the optimism of a song sung, low and sweet, in the ear under a cathedral ceiling. That is your story. That is your melody, resolving joyfully, resolving with the notes that both of you know by heart.
*For Roger and Michelle, on their wedding day
She never asked about the ugly parts until later, skimming over them as if they were still water. It was her downfall always, ever-drowning the fire later. No matter how small the droplets of good, she only saw them and nothing else.
Here is this about that. You can’t call it blindsiding if you’re just not looking.
We asked for nothing more than enough time for the writing of it all, one letter at a time, word by word, written in ink that left Rorschach blots on our hands. A salmon swam up my left index finger where I accidentally touched the pen. A small heart bloomed at the base of my right thumb.
I still don’t know who started it. I just know I had no inclination toward action until the moment when it became inevitable, as if I’d been tipping in a particular direction for hours, slowly losing what I had long recognized as equilibrium. There is no name for this, there are no rules delineating what comes next. There are only new levels to find, new approaches to discover, and such enjoyable, enjoyable surprises.
According to his mother, his father left so much pocket change lying around that she started saving it. In the end, she saved enough to buy him a new suit—his father always wondered how she’d bought it.
Later his father abandoned him, and he never got over the heartbreak.
He shared his father’s habit: piles of change left everywhere, like archaeological fragments. I collected it in a bowl, and he abandoned the money when he left me.
It was not enough for a suit. But it was enough for my first two tanks of gas out of town.
