eleventy-first anniversary

When I met Mike 17 years ago, I was looking at his bare feet while he lay napping on a dorm room floor, and had a sudden, clear, weary thought:  That's the man I'm going to marry. It was like cresting a hill and seeing that the road you still have to walk stretches on for miles and contains a few arduous uphills and some crumbling footholds on the side of a cliff. Probably worth it for the scenic bits, but exhausting and scary. Some people say that trust is everything in a relationship, and this has not been true for me. I don't have any trust left in me, but I have faith. If I am lost, Mike will come find me. If I am angry, he will bear my wrath. If I've done something stupid and fallen on my face, he will haul me up again. He has remained stubbornly beside me for 17 years, and despite the terrible things, the majority of our daily life together has been just as filled with laughter and adventure and children as I imagined for us as a lovestruck teenager. My brain still sharpens its knives at 3am, and forgiveness isn't something you can just choose to feel, but the meat and bone and blood of me loves the meat and bone and blood of him. Half our lives have mashed together into this story, we know each other as well as two people can by now. 

So last year, on the 10th anniversary of our first marriage, we went and got married again. It wasn't documented, just done quietly under a plastic trellis in front of a judge. "We had our divorce annulled," he told his mother afterward over the phone. 

This year makes 11 and 1, in government document years. So here are some things that I think of when considering my husband. 

This poem, by Ogden Nash, which makes me laugh:

Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
Of a marriage conducted with economy
In the Twentieth Century Anno Donomy.
We’ll live in a dear little walk-up flat
With practically room to swing a cat
And a potted cactus to give it hauteur
And a bathtub equipped with dark brown water.
We’ll eat, without undue discouragement,
Foods low in cost but high in nouragement
And quaff with pleasure, while chatting wittily,
The peculiar wine of Little Italy.
We’ll remind each other it’s smart to be thrifty
And buy our clothes for something-fifty.
We’ll bus for miles on holidays
For seats at depressing matinees,
And every Sunday we’ll have a lark
And take a walk in Central Park.
And one of these days not too remote
You’ll probably up and cut my throat.

Some romances are played out in song, but ours isn't. I keep my music to myself. If I had to pick a song about us, this one comes to mind:

You just have to plunge ahead in life and hang on to who's on the other end of your arm.