In the summer of 2024, I thought I fell in love. We bet sleep against the rising sun and kissed under the blaring New York skies and he slid rings onto my fingers, cosplaying some reality from my TikTok feed. I've always believed that multiples of fours were lucky — 2000, 2016, 2024. The lips pressed onto knuckles, the promise between lips that we'd always stay. And the lies! The clumsy, sexy lies, the amateur lies about his calendar and my burning rage. They poured from our mouths, desperate to escape, like we'd never before said such important things in our lives. Hot, sweltering lies, one after the other streaming out. Filling the air around us, dancing as our feet wore out and he left me for younger, more coltish legs. I am sorry, I think. But only if he is.
We were teenagers, pointing fingers. We refused responsibility, could not take care of ourselves, much less one another.
And yet, that's what love is — not to burn, but to endure, to care, and to tend. To love is to be your mother, and you are my father, and we will care for each other like we are little kids. I will kiss your sweet skinned knees and you will smooth my rumpled hair. I will hold you when you weep hard tears, and you will try to hold them because your father never wanted his sons to see him weak. The world outside whirls and whirls, and the parents anchor. You love me with a workman's plodding heart. You love me with discipline; he loved me with fleeting thought.
For some time, I filled sheets and sheets of copy paper with graphite, fantasizing about the dream. We will celebrate monthly anniversaries, I imagined, and he will buy me glass necklaces and blooming roses. Surrealist artist Edward James designed his "wet footprint" staircase after seeing his wife pad on the carpet after the bath. The text always omits that they later divorced.
I was, quite honestly, unconvinced. You told me who you were, that you needed a calendar reminder for anniversaries, that you were forgetful about flowers, that you hated holding hands. Your unflashy truthfulness and kept promises stymied me. I thought you were lying until you kept showing up with a goofy smile at brunch, and you thought I was kidding until I kept showing up at your door. I told you I loved you far too early, and you returned it, first with a hard swallow and then with a nod. Our lips were burned from before. Love makes one impressionable, and I'd rather hold my heart in my chest, in my throat, than to impress it, unformed, onto you. I knew what you couldn't spill, and you knew what I held like a frog in my mouth.
The zoomers, the hippies, and the promiscuous French — they may have their fun. But love over decades is measured not in its loud declarations but its quiet proof. It is showering in the dark as not to disturb my sleep, it is the cardboard boxes thrown out when I'm at work, it is the earnestness with which he loves me. He is earning no credit, he asks for no points.
Perhaps most importantly, he will take me by the scruff of my neck and tell me when I am faulty. The greatest love is knowing you better than you know yourself. My sweetheart knows when I am misguided or hateful or terribly, horribly dehydrated. I bring him his cable-knit sweater when he's been working too long and I leave him his side of the bed so he might rest and I know the muscles on the midpoint of his spine are tense before my hands touch skin.
To love someone is not an impulse. It is not the rose petals for an Instagram story or the diamond for the masses or even the invention of the sewn staircase. It is not the beautiful lies but the truth, the hard truth, Schrodinger's love kept in the box until you know it is alive.
It is simply your hand on my back, alone in my apartment, today and yesterday and tomorrow, not even when it is hard but especially when it is hard. It is sacrifice, such that when I am selfish, that is when I most think of you.