To promise is to choose, when all is stripped away and nothing remains but the bone of it. Tomorrow, I will choose what I have chosen before, this the fifth time I’ve showed the skeleton of my decision, and with the words I speak I will bind my hand to another hand, her hand, and we will reset the clock once more. A year and a day since we’ve felt the leather wrap around these wrists, since we whispered out those familiar vows through lips nearly blue from the October chill.
Three days ago we celebrated our anniversary, four years to the day since we stood in that misty glen on the Isle of Skye and trembled together, not for cold but for the relief that comes when you finally stop carrying what was always too heavy to carry alone. Tomorrow, as the tradition invites, we will say the same promises to one another again, renewing them, choosing one another for a year and a day and not a moment less. The key to promises has never been making them, but keeping them, and we keep them by how we live, we keep them by making them again and again, each day we wake. We keep them by making them to others, but more, by making them to ourselves. Making the promise is as easy as breathing, keeping it, is the work, and love is in the work.
Love is in our work, and if I’ve learned anything over these last 4 years being married to Lady Gregson, I have learned this:
We cannot be lazy with love.
I have learned this through the hard days we’ve endured, certainly through the aching hours. We cannot be lazy when sorrow comes, we must be vigilant when the darkness rolls across the hillsides of those we give our hearts to and throws shadows on what once held light. We cannot be lazy with love when death points its long bony finger in our direction, when it takes those we’ve known a lifetime long, be it family or friend, we must be the arms when ours are tired, we must hold them when their legs go slack and the center of this earth pulls them too hard to the floor. Love is on our work, and my goodness we toil when a winter comes and feels like it will never go, sometimes it’s more sadness than snow that buries a home.
Love too is in the work of joy, of manufacturing more of it simply for the reaction on the face of the one you adore. It’s in the sneaking feet that rise from beds before they do, the tiptoe down the staircases to the coffee machine, the simplicity of making it so they don’t have to. It’s in the hierarchy that comes more effortlessly the more you practice, they before we, she before me, easy as breathing. Love is in the words, it’s always been the words, but not only poetry or song, in affirmation, in forgiveness, in apology when it is us that owns the fault. Maybe here more than so many places, love lives, in the admittance of not only guilt, but in the remorse for what our selfishness has caused. The work of love is the cleaving of thought away from our own reflection and onto the face of another, the severing of self-centeredness.
We cannot be lazy with love.
We cannot be lazy with those we love, cannot see these promises as conclusions foregone, as guarantees. We must choose yes, time and again we must choose, but more than this, we must be chosen. We must be worthy of being chosen, and this has not to do with the way we look, the money we make, the clothes we wear, nothing to do with the bodies we walk around in, the hairstyles, the talent we may or may not possess. To be worthy of choice, we must show ourselves as those that put in that work for love, that are willing to place another in front of us when it will benefit them to do so, behind us when it will protect them from harm. We must listen, my goodness we must listen, and more than listen, we must hear. There are entire paragraphs between the sentences left unsaid, hear these too, hear what they’ve not the words to say, as some are stolen by a fear planted long before you walked over the horizon line of their life.
Tomorrow, we will choose, or at least I will and I will spend my night with fingers and toes crossed, thumbs held, that she will choose me back. We will stand and we will whisper out soft syllables of pledge, of commitment, of avowal. I know not what the year and a day to come will hold, I imagine joy, I am certain of sorrow, but I will stand beside her, behind her, and in front of her the same. I will take what she cannot take, but listen when she says she can, trust that she’s the strength I’ve not, when life wears me thin. This the fifth time we’ve faced one another and bled into each other’s veins. This the yes, the of course I do.
Happy Anniversary my only love, the spinning of a planet around a sun that warms us where we stand, wrist to wrist, bound together as one thing.
I love you so, and I have said,
We cannot be lazy with love.
Repeat the promise,
to be not lazy with love.
Tie my hand to yours.
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