We must paint the walls in our home regularly, move if we have to, once we’ve tried all of the colors.
We will let the mundane creep in, of course, but we will enjoy always the glorious return to the edge of insanity, and we will stand there laughing at it together.
We will plant a lemon tree, and plums, persimmon, and something the neighborhood kids have never heard of. They will wonder if our house holds a bit of magic, and it will.
Our children will know love deeply. Not just what we give to them, but what they see us give to each other. They will not be able to watch us look into each other’s eyes, and say they do not know what love looks like.
We will fall into darkness many times. You will become defensive and sullen, in a constant search for distraction from your pain, relying on self sabotage and vices. I will become codependent, clingy, act like a martyr for those who do not ask for it, and live in a separate world that only exists to me. We will both flash between empathy and apathy. We will fight. Fighting will be as inevitable as rain in a storm.
And afterwards, when we can breathe a little better, we will hold each other and forgive. We will alter our behaviors to make each other’s lives a little easier, a little happier, if we can. We will give and receive, we will help each other find our center, our individualism, when it begins to muddle together. We will choose to ignore our often flaring egos, for you and I both find a friend in Pride.
We will make meals that are so terrible our kids won’t be able to eat them, and we will order pizza instead. We will cook up things so delicious that we know we would never be able to recreate it exactly, and all we will do is enjoy the fleeting flavor and make fake plans to open a restaurant.
We will love each other to exhaustion. We will have bad, stoic sex where we stop in the middle and turn away from each other to wonder “is this it?” We will have sex that is unprecedented and mind melting. That we will think about when we’re out at dinner together years later so that we can’t finish our meals and must immediately check into a hotel to feel each other closer just from the memory of it.
We will cry, usually just one at a time, but in rare moments, both together. We will learn to speak through looks. We will poke fun and tease, and we will recognize the moments where teasing has gone too far. We will stop at that line, a little over half of the time.
We will meet each other as strangers, over and over again. Every morning we will look at each other new, every anniversary, a different human standing before us than the year before. We will fall in love with thirty different versions of ourselves and each other, and continue to choose each other, even during our least favorite versions.
We will love and we will love and I will not accept anything less than living at least this fully, and I will not accept it without you.
