Four Weeks

[We interrupt your regularly scheduled birth story for a high-test shot o' romance. More intoxicating, less cirrhosis-promoting. About as likely to result in public indecency charges.]

1. There is candy bar love, which is for the young. It is sweet and easy and everywhere. It is bought sans thought, eaten sans appreciation. It is never further away than a few quarters and a crinkle of plastic. It is a delicacy for those who have never been hungry.

And then there is chicken dinner love.

You've come back from the wars. You've got stories the kids can't hear, furrows stitched across your forehead.

You are older. You are weary. Sugary simplicity does not cut it. Makes the teeth ache.

You sink down in the green chair, same wobbly leg as before (it will never be fixed, you've come to accept this, the flaw has become somewhat endearing).

She brings you a plate of roast chicken, potatoes, green beans from the little patch behind the shed.

She rests her head on your shoulder, rubs your back, quietly shoos away wild children, hopeful dogs and stealthy cats.

There is a deeper understanding of hunger now.

There is a tacit agreement to be gentle to one another, an understanding that life is too often anything but.

There is quiet wonder at how extraordinarily lucky you are.

Sometimes, there is cake.

2. Broken is a word loaded with ugliness, like hate or gallbladder or fundamentalist, and you've got to wonder "were we ever broken?", and there's two schools of thought on that, really, or possibly a million, like in the case of pasta sauce and oral sex and selecting winning lottery numbers, but in the simple model of things, there are two, and they are thus, option ONE, no, we were never broken, we might've chipped a tooth or two [insert oral sex joke here], but we squeezed our eyes shut and squeezed our fists closed and took the pummeling with fucking Gandhi-like aplomb, and now it's over, blessedly over, the sun has set on the empire of miserable unfulfillment and colonialist assholes in Old Navy Performance Oppressor! Khaki ensembles and goddamn it, we can finally untense, and then of course there's option TWO (and I sort of like option two, personally, but I also like Timbaland and Powerbars, so go figure), which lays it out like such, which is, yeah, oh yeah, were we ever, broken, battered, crushed, pulverized, stomped into fragments, flattened via steamroller, liquefied chemically, powdered anhydrously, broken broken BROKEN, but we each maintained a tiny little grain of Self throughout the entire process, and we always will, no Bunsen burner or cold-hearted bitch will filter that out, and although we've reassembled ourselves into new and interesting configurations, we're still very... miscible, mixable, deeper parts closer to the surface, more surface area to mingle, more flavor, tactile interest, sensation, hell, more of so many things, more than you'd ever have dreamed or expected while enduring the actual-factual breaking.

3. Around you and I, there is a cozy little sphere of warmth and safety and breathable oxygen. Out on the periphery, higher even than the silo, the refinery lights, the billboards and spray-painted devotions, there is outer space, and it is a place of aliens, uncertainty and stark black fear. Periodically, thoughts come hurtling from the sky, amazing and unexpected. Along the way, they accumulate fear, which is clingy like static electricity, only it is scratchy against the skin and cannot be banished by poking something metallic. A big, big thought gathers a large, large quantity of fear, and by the time it's a few miles above our heads, it's superheated with the stuff, and it glows and pulses and hums until finally the stress becomes too much. One thought can only absorb so much energy, even if the thing was the size of a Winnebago to begin with. So it fissures, cracks and disintegrates into elemental dust, and after the destruction there's an eerily pretty little orange smudge against the sky.

Although they say every so often one actually survives the trip. The Kaminski kids have one in their backyard... word has it the thing crashed through the roof of their barn one night while Bud was fixing up his tractor. Damn near needed a new set of overalls, I'll bet.

Anyway... they keep it out back by the tire-swing, neighborhood kids ooh and ahh and pay a nickel to chip off pieces with a ball-peen hammer. Supposedly the prettiest thing you'd ever hope to see.

4. This must be what the Grand Canyon would be like, if I weren’t terrified of falling, easily sunburnt and liable to wander off, get hopelessly lost in the desert and be forced to kill and eat my own burro.

I haven’t stood this close to this much potential in years. It is a space bigger than my brain can comprehend, in which things I can’t even fathom can be conjured into existence. It is huge and fantastic and overwhelming.

It’s bigger than awesome.

I am torn in several kajillion different directions; unlike a literal dismemberment, this one is downright wonderful. Requires less Neosporin, too.

I want to make you spicy Szechuan noodles. I want to see how we fight. I want to see how we make up. I want to make up stories for the kids. I want to be surprised and delighted and, weirdly enough, I have total faith that I will be. I want to take care of you when you’re sick. I want to do nothing arbitrarily. I want to be guided by rough experiences, good intentions and honest words rather than rote promises and accumulated trips to Target. I want to build something eclectic and odd and cozy and just right. I want to take nothing for granted. I want to take everything for a spin to see how fast it can go. I want to raise the kids, send them off to liberal arts colleges, invest in some sunblock and utility knives and head into what’s left of the jungle. I want to utterly forget the future, the very concept of a future, be it five minutes or five decades from now, and just lie here, silent and content and probably dead-tired, foreheads pressed together, still.