Seventeen Years
Seventeen years is long enough to know
what her silence sounds like at different temperatures,
long enough to know the joke she’ll make
before the setup’s finished, long enough
to have a shorthand for the things we’ve been through
that only works between us, coded into
a look or a word or nothing at all —
a raised eyebrow across a crowded table.
Seventeen years and I still want to tell her things,
that’s the part nobody warned me about —
that you’d still want to tell her everything you see,
still save her the funniest part of every story.
Seventeen years and I’m still surprised sometimes
by what she knows about me that I didn’t say,
the way she reads the day in how I hold my shoulders —
seventeen years and it still catches me.
We’ve had the bad years, I won’t pretend we haven’t,
the years when the distance wasn’t geographic,
when we lived in the same house and somehow
couldn’t find our way back to each other for a while.
You come through that or you don’t, and we came through it,
not gracefully, not all at once, but slowly,
the way a field comes back after a bad frost —
you don’t see it happening, then one day it has.
Seventeen years of learning what to let go,
what’s worth the fight and what’s worth the silence,
how to say the hard thing without burning the house,
how to hear the hard thing without going to ground.
That’s not romantic, I know how it sounds —
but there’s something on the other side of learning a person
that is deeper than the early feeling was,
something that the early feeling was trying to become.
She laughs at something on the TV and I look over
because her laugh is still one of my favorite sounds,
still specific in a way that I couldn’t describe
but would recognize across a loud restaurant.
I have memorized this person involuntarily,
the way you memorize a song you didn’t mean to learn —
she’s in me now at the level below thinking,
at the level where the breathing is.
And on the nights we sit out on the back porch
not saying much, the dark around us easy,
I think about the kid I was at twenty-five
who had no idea what he was walking into —
that it would be this long, this deep, this specific,
this much like work and this much like breathing,
this much the thing I’d choose again
if I came back around and had the choice.
Seventeen years. I’d do it again.
I’d do every hard year again just to get here,
to this porch, this dark, this specific silence
that means we’re both exactly where we want to be.