What Binds Us

Love, grief, forgiveness, hope.

The long history of back and forth believing in one another, or at least in ourselves, to keep fighting for the other.

How I have had to borrow your courage sometimes, to just look at the world in the eye and not buckle.

You are simpler than me. Take your coffee black.

We'll eat at the same meal or the same restaurant every single day, never even considering that to complain would be an option.

You wear golf shirts and polyester slacks that help you move the course.

Eighteen long holes, this all-day affair of manicured lawns, small targets, where precision and accuracy and consistency count for everything.

I take heavy cream and honey when it isn't oat milk or soy milk or some other vegan fill-in for God save me.

I am small and wounded and loud. You are quiet and steady and sovereign.

You prefer, I think, not to sweat the small or the large stuff. I am inside the stuff, shoveling on the coals, trying to get to the heart of the thing.

You simply let it be.

I try to imagine what binds us in this somehow perfectly unlikely and just as easily lucky friendship we call marriage, we call love, we call home.

It is almost only you with whose ties come no blood.

Not so much ache that we are just held together by the fallacy of sunken costs or the demonstration of a family unit that cannot be undone at any cost.

We instead are bound by something my tender heart cannot name, as if trust were a glue you could buy at the hardware store or double-sided tape to use on a gift we will never send.

I am tied to your morning ritual.

How sleepy-eyed and gravelly I stumble to your office each morning to find you there. Yellow legal pad in your lap, left-handed pen scratch on across the leg.

Bitcoin podcasts I imagine blazing in your aviator headphones. The quiet you have had otherwise, all to yourself for hours.

I am bumbly and impulsive and loathe routine, but you always greet me the same, as if you hadn't seen me for a hundred days.

The sing-songy, "Hey, Chu!" That makes my bones weak. That makes me belong.

I am used to being tethered to people through trauma, alcoholism, despair, the absence of belonging to something outside of myself.

But you are quiet and simple and smarter than me in ways that don't make me feel less than.

You know how to hold on to a thing whose nature is to flutter off and away without leaving any handprints or echoes.

Of course, we are bound by what we have made, both of us looking out our own windows, minding our own business until we are tired and done and together.

Then we made boys and a family and a story with pictures of people quite happy, doing nothing in particular, together.