People say “let’s grow old together.” Like it’s some pale pink fluttering thing. Like it doesn’t mean “yes, let’s love each other through more foibles, flaws, frailties, and failures than we even (now) know we possess.” I've heard people say “we’re only friends now— we aren’t in love (anymore). It’s over.” And they toss a nuke on the house with the comfortably stained carpets and the chipped paint—the good bones ignored and destroyed forever. And is there anything more tragic than giving up on friendship's fire while small embers burn on waiting only for the chance to leap again into flame? People said to us “You are too young to know about love.” They were a little right— but wrong to discourage us. I know now these lessons do not come with age. Only time can teach us how to hold on. Your hands around my wrists— my grip on your strong forearms— while a tornado whips us around. Unearthing the unspeakable, upending all that was comfortable, us watching—our faces strained and pale— as all we thought we knew is torn to bits. That swirling vortex would have torn us too by now if we’d let it. But I said to you, “No matter what.” I was only 19. But I meant it. —13 years of marriage and I love even more about you now than I did then. The storied paths of laughter and grief around your eyes welcome me home like an embrace. The white streaks of your beard are blessed as the snowy slopes where you first held my hand. And you? You love the tinsel in my hair, and the over-risen loaf of my soft middle stretched and collapsed with love and life. Not even my scars repulse you. You say "they just remind me that you are very brave." And the tethers that bind us— more than those pale pink flutterings of romantic aspirations or imaginary old-aged, happily ever afters: Instead your hands around my wrists— my grip on your strong forearms— and the nail pierced hands of the God-Man holding us together, even still.
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No words to describe the feeling of this depth of relationships.
~my heart~