This is what it felt like in my earliest imagination, I told her.
It’s not like fluffy clouds in a perpetually blue sky. It’s churning and dynamic. Sunshine and calm are earned after a difficult season of tempest.
Or to put it another way, it’s like a salad made with underwashed lettuce — still refreshing and healthful, but not without grit sliding between our teeth.
A decade ago, I coated my vision of Marriage&Partnership&Commitment with the hazy brush strokes of romanticism and inebriation and cultural expectation, even when the culture was counter-culture and the expectation was anti-traditional.
In the past, I tried to elbow lovers into this space we now share. I tried to corral the Partners Prior into being The One (even while decrying the notion of One, thinking myself SoEvolved as an embracer of nonmonogamy, nonexclusivity).
All that paradox, it eventually wore my rhetoric thin and hollow and even I couldn’t take myself seriously anymore.
And now, with you, I am smashing the paint pots with which I coated those Marriage/Partnership/Commitment visions. The broken bits grind under bare toes and puddles seep into the garden, and what blooms and blossoms and eventually bolts and dies away is the cycle of loving with you, fighting with you, growing with you, finding a space that is wiser, finding a me that knows she does not know, and embraces not-knowing with a quiet acceptance.
On my not-quite-broken knee I bow, tasting the grit and the sunshine, extending my elbows to make more room for what is unknown, but imagined.
this is beautiful writing, dear
There is such poetry in your writing.
I really like this post.
this really touched me. I’m going through a difficult time with my partner. gorgeous.