On the eve of our seventh anniversary, we are wearing our Norwegian Sweater t-shirts, listening to Christmas Fest, and decking our tree. This is a life well worth waiting for. Happy Advent, everyone. May all your longings bring you grace and beauty.

When you are gone my worl
d is very small.  It’s just me
and the cat, and a cup of tea
that cools too soon, like you
r side of the bed.  The apart
ment stretches to a football
field, and my footsteps echo
in it, climbing a spiral stairc
ase of dizziness.  The down
stairs neighbors are smokin
g again and I have no one to
complain with — just me and
the cat and the radio I leave
on all day.  So I reheat my t
ea and put another check in
my mind’s calendar, counti
ng hours till you come to wa
rm my life again. 

I swear I’ve written this before, but
I can’t find any proof I have. Maybe
the words came to me long ago and
just stayed there. So here’s the thing.
I don’t sleep when you’re gone. My
body is accustomed to your body.  
How can I sleep when there is nothing
for my left arm to wrap round, my
right arm to press against? The
compass of my heart is spinning wild.
True north has gone due east and I
am lost. I will be up twice as late to
be half as tired as I ought to be. I
say this not to guilt you but just to
say I love you and I miss you and I
can’t sleep very well without you, so
would you please come home, safe
and soon. 

For the seventh year we’ve known each other
and the sixth year we’ve loved each other
we’ll be apart tomorrow.  Turkey and taters and cranberries
laid end to end could easily span the three hundred miles
that will lie between us.  This is how it is;
it’s not okay, but it’s still real, and I will sleep alone
whether we like it this way or not.

So I will spend Black Friday with a black-and-white cat
snoozing happily on my lazy lap, and we will watch
TV shows I love so well I know each word of dialogue
because to hear them is like having a friend in the house.
And I will be alone, and you will be a little lonely,
because of the beauty of what we have and the sadness
of not having it, for a while.

But I will be thankful, because I am learning how many
hunger for only three hundred miles and a few days
as the gap between them and their love; and I am learning
how many other lonely people feel alone; and I am thinking
that, little as I like it, this is where I need to be.  Or at least
this is where I am, and that is real.

And I will be thankful, because after seven years of crying
I put my pain to paper, and said as boldly as I could,
“I am worthy of loving your daughter, and I am worthy
of knowing you and you knowing me.”  And your father
called you and said I was a good writer and he
was a stubborn old Norwegian.  We’ll still be apart
this Thanksgiving, but less so, because the walls of family
and duty are starting to look more like stained glass, with
places to see through if you look long enough, and a crank
to open the window when the weather is right. 

I will not buy you rubies
until they find a cave of them
as rich as the first merlot we shared,
and as full and sparkling as our kisses after.

I will not buy you sapphires
unless you can hold them to the light
and see the ocean off Oahu where we swam.

But I’ll gladly buy you emeralds, no matter what the grade,
because we’ll only laugh and remember
when the girl at Macys told you wrong
and said they were my birthstone,
when you and I now know
I’m a diamond in the rough, 
baby we’re diamonds in the rough.

The whole lovely world’s gone orange
and my soul sings with ineffable and unrhymeable joy.
House by house they stand up for us.
Yard by yard promises,
“The someday of which you dream
is not so very far away.” 

When we get married,
I don’t want rice or doves or bubbles,
and I don’t care if you wear white. 

What I want is this feeling
of coming home, not just to you,
but to a whole city full of people
who live the word prevenience:
“we welcome you, we love you,
we support you
even before you picked the china patterns.”

[On November 6th, the Minnesotan ballot will include Amendment 1:  ”The constitution shall be amended to define marriage as between one man and one woman.”  The above signs are from yards, businesses, and churches in our south Minneapolis neighborhood, urging passerby to vote No against marriage inequality.]

This morning I have read a study claiming
that in the average span of life
I will meet many people with whom I could fall in love,
maybe ten with whom I could try to build a life.
Scientifically you and I met far too soon,
and we are halfway doomed to someday split this bed
where we lie late into the night and read.

Yet the earth is turning thousands of miles a minute
beneath your still-sleeping back,
and the day is breaking on our seventh year together.
Our morning kisses are promises
that we are trying to break together,
not apart, if ever we do.

You and I both loved before,
in that desperate adolescent way,
where loving another and knowing yourself are tangled up,
twin umbilical cords that feed who we become.

We have scars, you and I,
but they are natural to us now as bellybuttons.

Everyone I ever said I loved became stars in my night sky,
a constellation pointing me towards your sunrise.

…what if we did have one randomly-assigned perfect soul mate, and we couldn’t be happy with anyone else? Would we find each other?

We’ll assume your soul mate is set at birth. You know nothing about who or where they are, but—as in the romantic cliché—you’ll recognize each other the moment your eyes meet.

…The odds of running into your soul mate are incredibly small. The number of strangers we make eye contact with each day is hard to estimate. It can vary from almost none (shut-ins or people in small towns) to many thousands (a police officer in Times Square). Let’s suppose you lock eyes with an average of a few dozen new strangers each day. (I’m pretty introverted, so for me that’s definitely a generous estimate.) If 10% of them are close to your age, that’s around 50,000 people in a lifetime. Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, it means you’ll only find true love in one lifetime out of ten thousand.

- Randall, of xkcd, “What If #9”

I don’t mean to seem anti-romantic when I share this.  In fact, I feel the opposite.

The best of what I know about love, real love, is that it takes work.  Even when it happens in an instant (and it didn’t, for me and Kristi), the work of figuring out how two lives become one is just that — work.  It takes commitment, and time, and arguing, and listening, and learning to listen even though the other person is totally wrong about how important folding your towels in thirds is.

I like the idea of soul mates, the romanticism of it, the way it explains how markedly different you feel when you’re in love.

But after almost seven years together, I really like the way my life and her life has become our life — not because it was destiny, but because we’ve worked at it. I look at our life and I see the patches where we stitched it together, the elbow grease where we fought it out, all of that work amidst the pieces that just fit together right off the bat.

justasklionheart:

This Is How She Makes Me Feel - Anis Mojgani

There are cities growing inside my chest, the cities all look like New York in the fifties, every building tall enough to touch a cloud, every automobile is a convertible, all the men wear hats and neckties, the women all have beautiful shapes of color upon them, and someone has saved a baby. There is a parade. Someone has saved all the babies. There is the biggest parade moving through my streets, the skies explode with ticker tape, strangers kiss on every corner, their kisses are what make me live forever, this is how she makes me feel. Like honey and trombones. Like honey and trombones.