There is nothing fair about life, and there is nothing fair about love. There is no method or formula to happiness, except to choose – each and every day – to allow yourself the circumstances you are offered. To welcome them and feel them and search for the beauty in the quarantine.
And over our year together – one on November 7th– we have adventured on every park apparatus we know: on the seesaw, giving and taking and giving again. On the merry-go-round, spinning faster, wild, blurred, toward covid quarantine-remote work we never intended to pursue. Off the merry-go-round, and promptly.We’ve climbed the rusty ladder of hard election work, slid down the hot metal slide of shared grief. We’ve crossed the monkey bars into shed-remodeling-hood – learning as we go – one rung, then two. We have swung high and low, up and down, pumping our legs to a soundless rhythm we cannot hear or see, but can feel.
Year one is this: unrolling the picnic blanket and laying down in green grass. There is rest and cloud-watching and dream-telling and quiet. It is he with his sacked lunch that he brought just to share with me, neither of us seeking to change the contents of each others’ snacks. We feed ourselves in harmony – he’ll choose biscuits, I’ll choose mochi – and the difference is okay. It’s good. We are happy as two, so we are happy as one.
Year one is long enough to let go of the idea that you have the rest of your life to slowly, surely change your lover, and instead, accepting – embracing – the changes your lover has created in you.
Year one is long enough to own my contribution to the pair, to learn to take care of myself to learn to take care of another. It is seeking responsibility for my joy, my fulfillment, my being. It is understanding that the goal of two is to become stronger than one. Woven. Molded. Sealed.
Year one is to grow into ourselves, to stop allowing circumstance or trial or emotion to diminish our spirits, and instead, to stretch far beyond the scratchy blanket and the picnic ants and rise above the up-rooted trees surrounding us. It is to plant, and to be planted.
To look above and greet the sun, and hear the rain, and feel the clouds, and return to the biscuits, the mochi, the two.
