Six

In the first year of our love the world hums itself into a quiet steady frenzy. In the heat of the summer I am collapsing under contradiction. Before now I have fallen for men who have pursued me: setting the tone and the pace of our courtship. Now, I feel in control, driving it steady and shakily into a shaded future.

We meet outside: a park, your work, the outside of my duplex for a movie night. I force you to watch episodes of the Simpsons and something else (I can’t remember what) while getting too tipsy on wine and sweets.

What I do not tell you, but I am sure you know, is that I am terrified of meeting someone new. It is not that I haven’t dated since my last relationship, it’s just the aftershock of it was so great its ripples reached far into the present, keeping me unsteady—uncertain of my own decisions.

Something else I never told you: I thought I would write a book about apocalyptic visions or the end of the world. Of gargantuan scale and fever and rhetoric. Something to be proud of and profound. I kept coming back to one thought I had. Or one obsession. Certainly inside there are some of those things. Tiny apocalypses that go unnoticed, world ending fevers that lead to bad breakups, tidal waves that crash down in the middle of brunch and spoil the whole mood.

For years I rode out south east, towards the Texas bay to spend the summers in a ghost town where my parents owned a summer house. It was nothing special at first: a long rectangle tacked together and held over from the bygone days of my mother’s father. The floors boards creaked and the wooden shutter doors splintered fingers if you weren’t careful. In the latter years the foundation sank and my father, so certain of his own ingenuity spent an entire two days attempting to jack up the joists to even it out, before giving up and seeking professional help.

Out near the bay, in the past memory of this place, the tides rose and the seas churned great big waves that smashed hard against the land, collapsing the shoddy siding of the buildings and destroying the railroads and piers, reducing everything to dust and rubble.

There is no poetry there. No symbolism. This is just a fact; a true story of something that happened before I loved you. For every other man I have tried to shape meaning or metaphor, scraping together the shattered bits of our shared history by my sheer tenuousness. But with you I come up blank. After all, how could metaphor capture six years of steady growth and safety?

In the third year of our love you long for something small and soft to keep you company. Compelled by security, the passing of your childhood dog, and the slow creep of time we visit dog adoption events and scroll through photos of cute pugs online.

I’ve always told you I want something bigger: a German Shepherd, or a lab, or something big enough to squish me and keep me safe. You are so certain about your decision and yet I am nervous, anxious, and full of grief. I tell you about the dog I adopted once, “a mistake,” I say. “I was chasing the dog I helped an ex raise, but it wasn’t a good fit and it made me suicidal.”

On the couch I tell you about my first dog: a small black thing with too much rage. Then I tell you about my second dog: the space dog that drifted away. “I had a dog already,” I say through sobs. “And I miss her all the time.”

Still we go forward. When we meet our small black dog he is full of love and the need for attention. He runs right to me, tongue hanging out, and then, he never leaves my side again.

In Chicago, during the fourth year of our love, we walk too much and spend the rest of the time laid out and lazy in a too-small hotel room decompressing from the year so far. We visit the art museum and I watch as you carefully observe each painting: first taking a step forward, tilting your head up and down, then, a careful step back, a gentle gaze as you take the entire picture in.

It is our inside joke that we both cry too easily. A four panel comic about a mom lifting her kid up to appreciate art can really get us going. And yet, here you are mimicking the very thing that brings you to tears. I always think people are too quiet at museums. Art, in my mind, is meant to be loudly appreciated: loved, laughed at, contemplated. The quiet contemplation is simply a consequence of people trained to be afraid of their own vulnerability or lack thereof.

At the Pride festival we stand close together and bob (or you do I don’t) to music and drag performances. A man tries to hit on me, and me, too oblivious, mistakes this as someone just being too friendly. There are connections there; analogies I am learning all the time. I am stepping back, mimicking the things that make me cry. Being unafraid of vulnerability. Or at least the artifice of it.

In our fifth year of love, we attend a friend’s wedding in D.C. during the cherry blossom season. The sun is high and hot and the trees are bright pink and in a constant shed. We walk around the monuments, getting stuck in the crowds. We force ourselves through the unmoving masses: dodging, weaving, and creating openings where non existed before.

Everyone I know is slowly getting married and sometime, during this fifth year, you tell me you want to marry me, and I explain to you my complex and contradictory feelings on marriage. How I don’t disagree with it, how I want it, but how somehow it feels strange, like the metaphor of it doesn’t fit with me. “Besides,” I say. “I don’t even like rings”

Still, I scribble vows and research rings in secret. “You know,” my therapist says. “You can always change. Things only mean the meaning you give them. Nothing else.”

In New York we do too much. In New York we eat too much food and look at art and buy novelty gifts from the Pokemon store. In New York we ride the subway and attend a play and drink and share another impossibly small hotel room. The weather is perfect, impossibly so: bright skies and crisp cool weather.

A man at the museum cafe asks us if we’ve been here before and you, to my shock, tell him it’s my third time here. To me it feels brand new. There is so much I want to share with you. Each time I do, I marvel at how it gets transformed.