Looking Back, Loving Forward

 My dear love,

You know, for you have always known, how my life turned on that simple knock at the door. Dee stood beside you, but it was you I saw, you whose hand I reached for, repeating your name as though it were scripture, careful not to wound it with clumsy breath. We smiled, and our eyes touched. There was no lightning, no song. Only the quiet warmth of your hand, while my heart, foolishly wandered elsewhere.

Yet even then we began circling one another, like planets bound by an unseen gravity. In Chouinard Hall, by that worn pool table, in the cracked rhythm of our little tribe, I offered a bite of my hamburger out of habit, a ceremony of my mother’s training. No one ever accepted. Until you. And when you asked for just a little, I gave you half, though I had so little of my own. After that, I bought two. One for me. One for you. That is how love teaches us, long before we know its name.

Then came the earthquake, the shattering, the leaving, the drifting. I tried to fashion a new life from fragments. And then, as though the universe itself had tired of our distance, your name appeared again, printed on a flyer, carried to me in my mother’s hands. That card, that summons, was more than chance. It was a command.

When we met again, I was undone by your beauty, not only the beauty of your face but the beauty of your spirit, the truth of your being. Yet even then you belonged to another. So we waited. We talked each day. We told our stories. We leaned into the heat of each other’s art and faith and laughter, until one night, after a movie, we sat in your driveway, under the stars in Mr. Charlie and you placed a poem in my hand. A prophecy. I kissed you, clumsy, trembling, teeth knocking together, like two children who had not yet learned the grace of desire.

But love is patient. It will teach the body what the soul already knows. And so it did.

Now, after all these years, twenty-five, twenty-seven, what do numbers matter, I still feel the pulse of that poem, the sweetness of that first awkward kiss. We have stumbled and risen, we have endured what the world has placed upon us, and through it all we have remained faithful to the only thing that matters: the miracle of our love.

Your poem poisted, “Can I love you a little less than God?” And I know now that the question is unanswerable, because God is revealed in the love we bear one another. Even still, loving you rearranges everything for me. It always has and always will. 

Even after the end of time,
Huggy