I’m going to be honest about the hard to love part —
because every honest love song should include it.
I am not the easiest person to live with full time —
I have my systems, my silences, my specific speed,
I can go internal in a way that leaves no window,
I can be wrong and know I’m wrong and still defend the wrong thing
in a way that’s exhausting to be across from —
she has told me this, I know she’s right.
Hard to love is what I am on the bad days —
present but absent, close but unreachable —
the man in the room who’s actually somewhere else
that he won’t let you come to and find him.
Hard to love is what I am when the week’s been long,
when I’ve used everything I have on the world outside
and come home empty, with nothing for the person
who deserves at least something, who deserves the best of it.
She loves me anyway. That’s the part I marvel at.
Not the unconditional-love platitude —
I mean the specific, daily, actual practice
of loving a person who gives her less than he should.
She doesn’t keep score on the deficit days —
she draws on some reserve I didn’t know was there —
and she meets me where I am, even the unreachable place,
she finds a way to reach it and not resent the reaching.
I’ve asked her, on the honest nights, how she does it —
and she says something that takes me a minute to understand:
she says she loves the whole picture, not just the easy parts,
and the hard parts are in the picture so she loves those too.
That’s either the most forgiving thing a person can say
or the most sophisticated understanding of love I’ve ever heard —
probably both, probably it’s the same thing —
and I don’t take it for granted, I don’t let myself.
What I try to do — and I don’t always manage —
is bring what’s left when the world has taken most of it.
The scraps at the end of the day are still something,
still mine, still belong to her if I give them willingly.
And the giving willingly is the practice —
not the big romantic gesture but the small daily offering:
the question about her day when I’d rather be quiet,
the staying present when leaving into my head is easier.
She makes me want to be less hard to love.
Not because she says so — she doesn’t say so —
but because watching someone love you through the difficult
makes you want to make the difficult less frequent.
I’m a better man than the one she started with —
not by much, not by as much as she deserves —
but the direction of the change is the right direction,
and she’s the reason the direction changed at all.
Here’s what I know: she deserves the easy man.
She deserves the man who shows up full every evening.
I’m working on being that man more of the time —
it’s incremental, it’s slow, but the direction is right.
And on the nights I get it right, when I come home present,
when I give her the good self not the depleted one —
she looks at me like I’ve done something remarkable,
which tells me how often she’s been making do.