Words for Summer

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  Here’s to hoping I’m holding your hand, at the end of all this.  To starting this new set of adventures together, for better or worse.  To sending you off with my heart, across all the miles.  I love you, Henry.  On way, or another, I always will.  I’ll do my best to be good for you.  Just come home to me.  I think that’s all I really want.  I just want home to stay you and me.

A lot of my friends are getting married, these days.  When I look through their photos… of the proposals, wedding showers, venue hunting, I feel this little squeeze in my chest.  I thought, maybe, it was because some part of me wants that.  Some part of me, maybe, wants to be able to show everybody that you’re mine and you’re mine forever.  I don’t think that’s really it, though.  I think it’s the carefree smiles and sense of contentment that is so pervasive in the photos, the emphatic understanding that they’re confident in their futures, that makes my heart ache a little bit. You and I, we are a ship sailing across the horizon with a crew that doesn’t know how to swim.  There is such humming potential for beauty and adventure, on the other side of that sunset, but so much unknown in the twilight.  We have the stars as our guide and the wind at our backs, but these things are so precious and transient.  The first roll of storm clouds, the first breathless day.  I don’t know when they’ll come, only that they will.  I don’t know how our course will be thrown.  I don’t know if we’ll make it to our destination.  I don’t know if we know what that destination even is. I think I’m aching for a compass, in the end.  I’m so incredibly envious of the simplicity these friends of mine have found.  They have burned away all the worry and doubt and chosen to lock arms with another soul and face forever.  They have charted their course.  I wish, I think, that our love was a little more selfish.  I wish I could point to a future and say, “Come with me, let’s go together,” without feeling like I’m pulling you from the great things you’ll make for yourself.  I wish you could take my hand and run, without the fear of either of us stumbling.  I want to know the way the next chapter ends. I know you know how much I struggle with this sense of being lost in the dark.  I know you can’t fix it, too.  To be honest, I love you for not trying to fix it.  I don’t think I could love you, the way I love you, if we weren’t firm in facing the unknown without trying to cast light on it.  I like to romanticize us, you see.  As much as we are a ship sailing into the vast beyond, we are Magellan, we are Columbus, we are great explorers.  We may not find what we think we’re looking for, but we will find some form of greatness.  You will never be anything less than the most brilliant chapter of my childhood and the most spectacular prologue to the rest of my life.  That, by itself, already makes us amazing. So, what I mean to say is, I cannot stop the squeeze of my heart that wants simplicity and a definitive you.  I cannot stop the stress and confusion of our forward momentum.  I cannot promise you I won’t cry and yell and tell you that you must come home.  I can promise you, though, that I will support you the best way that I can.  I will trim the sails to match whatever wind comes our way.  I will wait for you until you ask me to stop.  But, I will also live my life without regret.  I will explore my awaiting oceans and bring back stories to make you proud.  I will not compromise our adventure for a contrived port of landing. In the end, we may be on a ship in uncharted waters, but our night skies will be brilliant and our discoveries infinite and I will love every moment of our voyage.  I think I’m okay with trading the comfortable for our beautiful journey.  So, please, even in those moments that I become frustrated or unhappy, don’t ever doubt that I love every moment of Us.  Together, or miles apart, I want to keep moving with you.  I want the terror and the beauty of our sea, in its fullness.