Love Changes You

Sometimes I write because I want to share with everyone great things I’ve discovered. Sometimes I write because I’m trying to figure things out.

And then there’s those orange nights when the train whistle blows and the mind wanders the shiny black streets and brims with so many big indescribable things. The compulsion to write is as strong as the compulsion to walk, to think, to dream, to wonder. Launched to the sky with amazement, still tethered by reality. I want to remember this day, this thought. When my brain is old and begins to forget, I want this moment remembered as vividly as I feel it today penning these words. This isn’t for you; this is for my tomorrow’s sake.

I’m lying beside the woman I love, amazed by the very rise and fall of her form. Every day new reasons to love her blossom like a dogwood in spring and make my life more beautiful. I can hardly keep track. I think it’s very much like the journey through childhood. Children are filled with a bright wonder at each new experience, and every encounter, every contact forges their perspective of the world. Even the most subtle family dynamics affect a child’s personality. Mom loves to hug and so does Susie. Dad is shy and Junior has a hard time making friends. All of these interactions shape the way a child looks at life and slowly makes him who he will be.

So I lie here, visibly changed. Certainly I would miss her if she were gone, but the weaving process has begun. I cannot stop it. My life’s roots are intertwined and as we grow deeper, stronger and wider, we cannot help but grow more inseparable. People who divorce after forty years can do so only because they did not weave together the saplings at the onset. You can’t fell a tree that has been fused to another; taking one down will take the other. Separation is only possible if unity was never complete.

Another funny thing about love is how often it proves you wrong. Someone once said that they’d like to meet the man who wrote the book of love and shake his hand. I suggest that man doesn’t exist, or if he does, he is a madman revisionist. Every time I’ve attempted to scrawl my own passage into the book of love, I read it the next day only to find it passé. Standing on that stage July 8th, 2005, swearing my vows before God and everyone, I felt that my love could grow no stronger, my heart could take no more. I even wrote something like that in a frequently outmoded journal. Was I ever wrong!

So why write this, if today’s love is only going to be eclipsed by tomorrow’s greater love? Why make the effort to write if the information will be cold tomorrow? Because despite indications to the contrary, this journal is more than mere ramblings and meanderings—it is a history book entitled Cross-sections of Life. Isn’t that all we have anyway, at least for the present?

My mind flies up and across the ever-hastening midnight to catch a glimpse of the fleeting sun in his dappled sky, borne up by the rising form beside me. A pause. Then the breath slowly escapes her lungs and I close my eyes to sleep.