Monogamous Birds of a Feather

I can hear you breathe as you sit in the other room, listening to a lecture on American History. You sit in the bright light in front of the air conditioning. History is your favorite subject, one you’re so passionate about you decided to pursue a second degree in it. While you do this, I sit under a blanket in the dim light of a lamp, clicking away, staring over at my unattended book. I had good intentions for reading tonight, but I have been distracted, as usual.

My darling husband. You sleep loudly, and you live quietly, introverted and shy. Your long red beard and freckled face indicates to any stranger that you’re Irish, although you swear your roots are buried deep in Viking legends. You are the kindest, with squinting, smiling eyes that disarm almost anyone. I am loud, boisterous, boastful, extroverted and significantly smaller in stature than you. I have blonde hair. You have none.

There are many things that separate us. We often laugh that we never even truly knew a thing about each other when we got married. If we would have known, we say. But if we would have known, I doubt we’d choose anything differently. We were young and foolishly, madly, ridiculously in love. The kind of love that puts a hitch in your pulse and finds you catching your breath more often than not. The kind of love that makes your skin tingle and your eyes water and your laughter go loud. The kind of love that makes you say, “I miss you”, even when you’re standing right there. You could say we’re modern love. I’d say we’re more like the oldest kind of love.

I still feel that hitch when I watch you cut our son’s hair in the driveway, or when I feel your smooth foot on the edge of the bed with my own. My eyes water when I watch you with our daughters, careful and intentional in your words and your affections towards them. Your voice still sounds like the first time I ever heard it, late in the middle of the night on the phone. So much distance between us then, but for the first time, I felt like there was never anything that could separate us.

I still feel that hitch when we drive in the car, the kids in the back, and turn up that song we played so many times in the beginning. I hold your arm and you lean in, looking forward, barely noticing that nothing has even changed. Our bodies have grown older and our arms have grown heavier with the weight of our lives. But nothing has really changed at all.

And when we are together, standing in the yard, waiting on the sun to end the day, I suppose that is my favorite part. We are tired with love, sitting on old patio chairs, dirty feet resting up. Chasing the dog and listening to the crickets come alive. Here we are, my darling love. This is us.

It has been so many years since that first time. Since I walked through the baggage claim and saw you standing there. Since we held hands and felt the humidity from the ocean air on our faces and cried because we knew the world would never be the same when we had to go home.

There has been so much time that has passed that it sometimes begins to blur into one long season, changing landscapes around us, blurring forward and backward and sideways. But there we are, in the middle, holding tight. There are no blurring seasons when I look at your face, because it is steadfast, unchanging, profoundly sure of where we are. Together.