Falling
I wore a cozy, rose-colored sweater with an exaggerated turtleneck and wooden earrings shaped like teardrops. I remember because I spent an entire day stress-shopping for that sweater, for the impeccable “first date look.” You wore a white jacket with a slanted zipper and your own skates. After lacing up, I stepped cautiously onto the ice and felt every muscle in my body tense. But then you stretched out your hand for mine. My rigid body relaxed into your steadying strength. Under the bright white tent and quiet night sky, we danced.
Several dates later (though not many days), we exchanged Christmas gifts in the kitchen of my apartment. I unwrapped two tickets to the upcoming Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert. You unwrapped the movie Notting Hill, a thoughtful nod to our first inside joke. “It’s perfect,” I think you said and then, “just like you.” And before I could process what was happening, our lips brushed to the tune of every happy alarm in my head.
Priorities and preferences shifted rather quickly after that night.
I swung by your house after twelve hour work days because sleep could wait. You sacrificed grad school because it was interfering too much. I spent Thursday nights on bleachers cheering for your old-man softball team. You spent one entire evening listening to live country music and several more wandering First Friday art strolls. I became a soccer fan and you became a sushi fan.
One weekend you were away and I sat on a park bench for two whole days writing you a love letter because, it seemed right.
Nestled on the couch in the shadow of a movie ended long before, you whispered, “I wish I could hold you forever.” This also seemed right.
This was love. We were sure of it.
You dropped to your knee and asked me to be your wife in the parking garage on 47th and Pennsylvania. A few months later, dressed in white, I twirled slowly before you and brushed a single tear from your cheek.
As newlyweds we explored Costa Rica and Italy and the coast of Maine because I love to travel. We also spent quiet evenings at home because you love popcorn and board games most people have never heard of.
On my birthday, you took me skydiving yet waited on the ground because open doors and airplanes are foolishness in your mind. On our anniversary, I inscribed 365 hearts and hung them from the ceiling in our living room because I wanted you to know why I loved you.
Oh how we loved!
Do we still?
Those gestures of love, once romantic and easy, now feel decidedly not.
Because when we eat sushi, we also attempt to pick food up off the floor faster than the toddler can throw it down. When we play a board game, we cautiously toe the line between competing and preserving our preschooler’s confidence. And when we travel, well, we wake earlier than we’d like, we cut adventures short to find the nearest bathroom and we avoid the production of patronizing a restaurant three times a day at all costs.
Our two little alarm clocks, they changed everything.
It feels like a loss some days.
But what I think might be true, Darling, about all those years before, the easy, exhilarating ones… I think they were only our falling.
It’s as if we leapt that first day, from the highest of cliffs into euphoric bliss. With nothing to push back against us, nothing to calm the butterflies wild within, we just kept falling, weightless, free.
It was a rush, falling in love.
Until we crashed into the water below. Our graceful fall, swallowed up into the sea. Some days we struggle in this dizzying new world. Love moves more slowly than we’d like and requires more effort than we can muster. Some days we long for the ease of the air that resisted us not.
Oh but those days, they were only our falling.
And this sea?
It is growing in us the real thing.
This love rises early with the kids while you rest a few minutes more and whisks them away to the park while I shower in silence, undisturbed. On your night to do dishes, it washes them before you get home. On my night to do bedtime, it nudges me out of the house toward chai and an empty notebook.
This love listens because you process verbally.
This love waits patiently to discuss because I don’t.
When struggle finds our home, this love sits in silence, together. Prays, together. Grieves, together. Most often though, this love creates, together. Laughs, together. Dreams, together. It encourages the other to pursue opportunity and challenge. It finds overwhelming delight in those two little alarm clocks.
It is not glamorous.
Not effortless.
Not perfect.
But it is rich with intention and sacrifice. It is generous and refreshing and life-giving (quite literally... he's two, she's four). It is a love that is lived, though not always felt.
Darling, these waters may have swallowed our fall, but they have awakened us to a dimension previously unknown and profoundly beautiful. And I think maybe, this love is the love. The goal. The love we were falling toward all along.
Images by Solar Photographers