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It may sound cliché-ish, but I married a woman who fits me. I’m one half of a two-piece puzzle.”
Marry the man who’s going to walk with you through the next fifty or sixty years. Open doors, hold your hand, make your coffee, rub lotion on the cracks of your feet, put you up on a pedestal where you belong. Is he marrying your face and your bottle-blond hair, or will he love you when you look like whoever you’re going to look like in fifty years?”
He nodded. “Sometimes Gayle and I will come up here and spend two or three hours. Not saying a word. And not feeling like we need to. Not filling the air with a bunch of static.
You turned your head sideways, half smiling. “Anyone ever told you you have a nice voice?” My finger touched my voice box. My voice rose about eight octaves. “No.” I cleared my throat. “I mean…” Lower this time. “No.” You opened a notebook, started flipping through it. You crossed one leg over the other. “Well…you do. It’s…warm.”
Fleetwood Mac talks about leather and lace. My dad was handy with the leather. Our home had no lace—at
My freshman year I won the 400-meter dash in 50.9 seconds, anchored the 4 × 400 meter relay, and won the mile in 4:28. That made me state champion in three events. Dad drove me home in silence. No celebration dinner. No day off. No moment. He parked the car. “Five o’clock will come early. If you’re going to break four minutes by your senior year, you’ve got some work to do.” Somewhere in there it occurred to me that, to my dad, I was only as good as my last time, and in truth, no time was ever good enough.
You entered the picture and lit my world with laughter and light and wonder.
“If the worst is a possibility, then you keep it on the table. Don’t hide from it. Don’t run. It can happen. And if and when it does, you need to have thought about it ahead of time. That way you’re not crushed when your worst thought becomes your reality.”
Waiting for somebody does that. It turns minutes to hours, hours to days, and days to several lifetimes.
Spend forever with me. Marry me? Please…” You wrapped your arms around me, and we fell. The sand and water and foam swallowed us, and you kissed me. Tears and salt and laughter and you were nodding. That was a good day. A good memory.
if he’s not remarkable and he doesn’t light you up, then, with all due respect to him, don’t marry him.”
a wedding is a bleeding together of those two souls. Like two rivers running together. All that water becoming the same water. Mine did that. “When I met you, I saw in your face the hope that yours might be that too. I guess meeting you was a reminder that I knew a precious, tender love at one time. And I think…if I’m honest, I wanted to brush up alongside that. To touch it. Come face-to-face with it. In doing so I thought maybe I could remember…because…I don’t want to forget.” She reached up and thumbed the tear off my face. “I think that’s why I invited you on the plane. And for that…that
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I have lain awake at night, listening to him talk to you, share his heart, apologize for what I don’t know and found myself aching and crying and wanting a man to hold me in his heart the way Ben holds you.
We could fix all that. And it wouldn’t take long. Broken people just need piecing back together.
Maybe each of us was once a complete whole. A clear picture. A single piece. Then something happened to crack and shatter us. Leaving us disconnected, torn and splintered. Some of us lie in a hundred pieces. Some ten thousand. Some are edged with sharp contrast. Some dim shades of gray. Some find they are missing pieces. Some find they have too many. In any case, we are left shaking our heads. It can’t be done.
someone comes along who mends a tattered edge, or returns a lost piece. The process is tedious, painful, and there are no shortcuts. Anything that promises to be one is not.
as we walk from the crash site—away from the wreckage—whole sections start taking shape, something vague we see out of the corner of our eye. For a second, we stop shaking our heads. We wonder. Maybe…just maybe. It’s risky for both of us. You must hope in an i...
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How then does one live? A memory echoed from beyond the dunes. Put one foot in front of the other.
Maybe piecing is continual. Maybe the glue takes time to dry. Maybe bones take time to mend. Maybe it’s okay that the mess I call me is in process. Maybe it’s a long, hard walk out of the crash site. Maybe the distance is different for each of us. Maybe love is bigger than my mess.
I looked down and found the pieces of me melting into one.
