sometime in the future

I am watching you sleep.

After all these years, it is still my favorite part of you—the way your face loosens into peace, the way sleep carries you somewhere strange and bright. Soon you will wake and tell me about it. A landscape that does not exist. A story that arrived fully formed and must be written before it fades.

In those moments I still see the young face I fell in love with.

We were young then, though we didn’t know it. Thirty-five years later we are older than we ever imagined becoming.

You are asleep now in the chair you made for me, grey hair nearly claiming the last of its old color. It was an anniversary gift—third or fourth, I can’t remember anymore. You expected it to live on the porch of the little house we rented on that street named for a tree. Instead, I kept it beside the bed so I could breathe in the smell of the wood.

Even here, in the only house we have ever owned, it stays in our bedroom. Sometimes I drag it across the floor and out to the deck so I can sit and listen to the river. You laugh whenever you catch me hauling it back inside.

Our lives have arranged themselves around years like markers along a road.

The year we got married.
The year we became empty nesters.
The year we dealt with illness.

When the law changed, we said marriage was wonderful for everyone else but unnecessary for us. What we had seemed sufficient. But two years later, in Vegas, you knelt in front of me anyway.

Traditions be damned, you said.

We were married in a chapel with an Elvis impersonator singing somewhere behind us. You paid an extra hundred dollars so someone would marry us the old-fashioned way.

You will wake soon, so I should start dinner. It is my turn.

You will wander into the kitchen in your sock feet and wrap your arms around my waist. Your nose will disappear into my hair while you tell me about your dream, or complain that there wasn’t one.

I will smile where you cannot see it.

We will eat. We will talk, or we won’t. Later, in bed, one of us will raise a quiet question we have been carrying all day. We will turn it over together in the dark until sleep takes us.

This is what remains after thirty-five years:

a chair worn smooth by time,
the sound of the river,
your breath warm against my neck in the kitchen,
two old people falling asleep mid-conversation.

This is our love.