Every bit of it: the love who came out to her family

in the middle of Thanksgiving grace.

The woman whose eyes were the mirror

where I learned to love my own face.

The day I got proposed to hours after

leaving the psych ward, the stitches still raw

in my arm, how unready I was to let myself be loved

by someone who thought, even at my lowest,

I shined the sun—my therapist1 is still working

with me on that one.

__________________________

1 My therapist’s name is Julie. I had a crush on a woman named Julie once.

I sent her a text that said, You have the same name as my therapist—I’m wondering if I could come lie down on your couch sometime. I was so proud of that text. I would have been prouder had I not accidentally sent it to Julie the therapist instead.

THE LAST HOURS

We’ve been dating only two weeks when the phone rings in the middle of the night. I beg every light green on my way to her house, and the grief gods answer. When I reach her, she is curled up in the garden. The earth is under her nails as if she’s just discovered something that could have fed the whole world wasn’t harvested in time. She says nothing for almost half an hour then whispers, My grandpa died. The moon flickers out like a candle.

* * *

Our second date was a walk through a neighborhood where the porches were bigger than both of our homes combined. Does it thrill you or crush you to know no one inside is more grateful than us—I would have asked if I hadn’t known the answer. If the answer wasn’t the reason I loved her already.

Because that night was the first time my eyes weren’t too shy to look directly at her face, I finally noticed the gap in her teeth on Mapleton street, beside a house shaped like a wedding cake. My grandparents have been married for sixty-three years, she told me, and a door in the center of her smile opened to a tiny Midwest church in 1944. At the end of the aisle—two kids, too young to know anything, were promising each other everything.

* * *

Now tonight, this simple garden is its own church as she tells me about the last hours of her grandfather’s life. He was in bed, she says. My grandma was sitting beside him, holding his hand. He said the word, love. Then a few minutes later he said it again. And then he kept saying it: Love love love, over and over for hours. He said it for hours then kissed my grandma goodbye. There are enough tears between us to pull a redwood tree out of a nettle seed or to water the garden beneath us for a century.

Six years from now, we will kiss for the last time. Seven years from now, we will take our first walk together as friends. Eight years from now, a bicycle accident will shatter her two front teeth and I’ll beg her not to let the dentist fill the gap. She won’t listen, but the door to the church will stay open anyway. Each time she smiles, a bouquet of wildflowers will fly from her grandmother’s twenty-two-year-old hand and move through the air in slow motion, trying to find a way to land in the arms of the whole world.