sometime in the future

I am watching you sleep. After all these years, it is still my favorite part of you. The way you are so peaceful and dreaming. In a while, you will wake and tell me about some fantastic landscape you just visited or a great story you must write immediately. I can still see your young face in those moments. I think we were so young when we got together, though I did not think it then. But now, after thirty-five years, we are really old – older than I could have imagined myself to be.

Here you are, asleep in my favorite chair, grey hair almost overtaking your true color. I remember the day you said you were committed to taking a nap every day. Even that seems like so long ago. Right after that weekend in Vegas, we married on a lark. They had passed the law in thirteen. We both agreed it was great, just not for us. What we had was enough. But then, in fifteen, you said it was time you made an honest woman of me. You got down on your knee, took my hand, and said, traditions be damned. I married you in a little wedding chapel with Elvis playing in the background. You paid the extra hundred dollars to be married by the only chapel that still married people in the old-fashioned way.

That was a romantic year for us. It marks our life in the difference in years. Some romantic, some not so romantic, and even some I would be happy to forget. I suspect you feel the same way, but we do not discuss it in these terms. What references that do occur come in the simple form of an anecdote. Like ‘that year you went to a guest lecture’, ‘the year of the affairs’, or ‘the year we got married.’ At least we learned somewhere that with the good, there is some bad.

You made me that chair as a third or fourth anniversary present. I forget which. I like to sit in it just for the woody smell. I think you expected me to put it on the porch at the house we rented on that street named for a tree. But I wanted it closer to me and put it by the bed. Even here, at the only house we have ever owned, I still have it in our bedroom. Sometimes, I carry it out to the back deck to sit and enjoy the sounds of the river. You laugh at me whenever you catch me pushing back across the floor.

You will be awake soon, so I will start dinner for us. It is my turn anyway. You will come in the kitchen padding in your sock feet and wrap your arms around my back. You will take a deep breath with your nose buried in my hair. I will smile, but you will not see it, and then I will listen as you recount your dream or lack thereof while I busy myself with the task of dinner. Over dinner, we will talk or not talk, depending on our mood. But when we go to bed, we will talk about something one of us is trying to process as I take you up in my arms, and we fall asleep. This is our routine after thirty-five years. This is our love.