(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.)
(For my beloved, who has always been The One, even when I didn’t yet know.)
In these years of marriage, I have watched my love bloom and grow and change, and I have learned that evolution is real, that it is here in this heart, here in this friendship, here in this love.
There was new love, the meeting, the great big moment of possibility when love shone white and pure and unknown, because maybe, just maybe, he might be The One and how would I know for sure?
All during that summer I worked as a reporter and he worked an office job, and I just happened to open that first e-mail from a boy I didn’t know, and he was bold and daring and interesting, asking questions no boy had ever asked, about me, about my life, about who I wanted to be. We learned one another on the keys of a computer, and the world that summer was bright and beautiful.
We planned the meeting, after a worship band practice he would attend, except he never showed, and I walked up the hill to work disappointed until I recognized his steps and I looked up and there he was, standing before me with that tight, curly black hair and those blue eyes looking like he knew it was me, too. We said hello, shook hands, and then we went our separate ways. Love whispered and waited.
And then, two years later, love turned yellow, like a warm maybe-promise, and my love began to speak, softly and slowly, during those group dates bowling and watching Harry Potter and sitting in the stands at football games.
My love murmured, could it be? I watched him play volleyball with my friends, and I watched him charm the people closest to me, and I watched him, somehow, grow larger right in front of me, taller and more important and significant because I saw him now with the eyes of my heart. I noticed the way he opened my car door before going round to his own like I was worth the extra effort and the way he looked in my eyes like I had something important to say and the way he guided me through doors with a hand on the small of my back because he was always, first, a gentleman. And the small of my back burned like my heart.
But I quieted that singing, shushed it down deep because I didn’t know if his heart was singing it too, and what if it wasn’t?
Oh, what if it wasn’t?
Suddenly, unexpectedly, love turned orange, a gentle fire-glow just a month later, and I knew in a way unexplainable that he was The One, and the whole world came alive, like the birds outside my window and the rain tapping pavement on my evening run and his steps marching up stairs to my apartment were all singing the same song that rose and fell in my heart.
And how was I to know I’d wear that flaming red dress the same night my love turned flaming red, the same night he stood on a stage to bend the knee and ask that question, the same night he would slip a ring on my finger and I would stare and stare and just keep staring at that beauty marking skin?
How was I to know that music, those dancers twirling through the Nutcracker, was but a prelude to the way my heart would bend melody after the unexpected question got its answer?
And then came the marriage-day, and my love turned orange and yellow and red and blue at the base so it blazed wild, burning where he touched with a touch as sweet as I could bear that first night I fell asleep with the man I called my husband. That love held passion and hope and expectation in tender arms, and the world beamed as it had never done before, a sky lit brilliantly by sun and fire and dreams in the middle of a night.
We spent those days honeymooning in Florida at the happiest place on earth, and my love turned pink, a sweet song that sang of all the world drawing toward decay except our love that would last forever, and we walked with hands wrapped tight and feet hardly touching stone, and I could see the yellow, the promise, there at the edges of that pink.
Those first months in a tiny apartment, my love turned purple, fiery and passionate like the red of before, yet storm-blue because it was hard, hard, hard living with this new, not-like-me person who took off shirts in the living room and squeezed the toothpaste from the bottom instead of the center and cleaned the shaved hair out of the sink but left the shaving cream spots, and some days my love glowed red-violet and some days it glowed blue-violet, because who knew it would be this hard living together, without end, all the days of my life?
“But we loved with a love that was more than love” (Edgar Allan Poe), and love began to build its mansion on all the rubble of self, the rubble of him mixed with the rubble of me, where two were becoming one, and we began to understand that love could not be whole in any place that had not yet been rent. So we let ourselves be torn and shredded, and we filled the holes of one another so our hearts started singing that love song together, instead of alone.
We learned the deep secret places in each other, and our love turned brilliantly green, like a new plant bursting through mud and earth. We pardoned and forgave and tried and tried again, because our love was great and wide and true, and we leaned on the places we loved and began to heal the places we didn’t, and we held on through moves and disappointments and changes, and we celebrated every victory like it was proof of life, because it was.
Then came children, and our love stretched like a rubber band, and it turned wild and pale purple and desperate, and all we knew of love was that love is all there is, and we helped and raised and survival-breathed so our song sang louder than those cries and shouts, stronger for the stretching.
Here we are, moving into those comfortable years, where we know all the strengths and all the weaknesses and all the places where we’ve grown up together, and our love has turned into a sunrise, yellow and orange and green and pink and purple and blue, like a sky filled with all the beauty of the earth, and our song is smooth and clear and lovely, like a dancing-close waltz.
Our love has bloomed flower-like, and our friendship stands like a great, sheltering tree because we know, now, that the survival of marriage lies not in changing but in being changed, and so we let it happen, over and over and over again.
Our sun-rise love serves one another because we know we’ll stand or fall in this, and we know it’s all a choice, this loving and being loved, this serving and being served, this being changed, and that’s why it glows like a sunrise, like the promise of a new day breaking.
We have not reached the growing old years, not yet, but I imagine them to look like a sunset, with colors like our sunrise except brighter and more vivid and more magnificent, because we will have lived a life of love in every color, and we will have loved all the smiles and all the tears and all the breaths of each other, and our love will have transcended death.
Because we will have learned it true, that “there is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved” (George Sand).
